Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of In Open Contempt by Irvin Weathersby Jr.

In Open Contempt by Irvin Weathersby Jr.

In Open Contempt

Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space

by Irvin Weathersby Jr.

  • Critics' Consensus (10):
  • Publishes:
  • Jan 7, 2025, 256 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

A stirring journey into the soul of a fractured America that confronts the enduring specter of white supremacy in our art, monuments, and public spaces, from a captivating new literary voice.

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America's history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country's landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.

Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America's landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation's true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"A sobering elegy for all we misremember." —Booklist (starred review)

"Weathersby writes with passion and clarity about the shameful history of chattel slavery, racial segregation, anti-Black violence, the brutal conquest of Native Americans, and the horrors of Hurricane Katrina, weaving this history of racial humiliation and oppression into his contemporary observations about the importance of monumentality and public art...A spirited and often poetic treatment of an important and timely topic." —Kirkus Reviews

"In language gorgeous enough to be lyric, Irvin Weathersby Jr. helps us examine some of the stone grotesquerie erected and living among us—the remainders of before, the reminders of blood. And in doing so with such care, he's granted us this work, a new monument to gaze at. One that should be raised and never razed. One that should be seen for what it is, an awe-striking masterpiece of love." —Jason Reynolds, #1 New York Times bestselling author

"The sentences alone in In Open Contempt make it one of the most memorable books of the decade. But it's the unexpected lingering and genius crafting of consequential action that makes this one of the freshest explorations of space I've ever read. Irvin Weathersby Jr. has made something we've never before seen, felt, or witnessed." —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

"When James Baldwin talked about being a witness, Irvin Weathersby's In Open Contempt is what he meant. With accounts and observations equally enlightening, enraging, harrowing, and hopeful, Weathersby guides the reader through contemporary and historical spaces both public and private with an unflinching veracity. It is, in fact, when he illustrates how the borders between time and distance are artificial, and the 'then' and the 'now' are inexorably linked, that the narrative sings most sublimely. In Open Contempt is an intelligent implication and a courageous achievement." —Robert Jones, Jr., New York Times bestselling author of The Prophets, a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction

This information about In Open Contempt was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Irvin Weathersby Jr.

Irvin Weathersby Jr. is a Brooklyn-based writer and professor from New Orleans. He teaches at Queensborough Community College and at City College in the MFA Creative Writing program. His writing has been featured in Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from The New School, an MA from Morgan State University, and a BA from Morehouse College and has received fellowships and awards from the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, the Research Foundation of CUNY, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more history, current affairs and religion...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket
    Prophet Song
    by Paul Lynch
    Paul Lynch's 2023 Booker Prize–winning Prophet Song is a speedboat of a novel that hurtles...
  • Book Jacket: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    by Lynda Cohen Loigman
    Lynda Cohen Loigman's delightful novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern opens in 1987. The titular ...
  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
The Rose Arbor
by Rhys Bowen
An investigation into a girl's disappearance uncovers a mystery dating back to World War II in a haunting novel of suspense.
Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Second hand books are wild books...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.