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A Story of Alabama
From a New Yorker staff writer and PEN Award winner, a blend of memoir, history, and reportage on one of the most complex and least understood states in America.
"In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster…."
Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery, Alabama―the former seat of the Confederacy―as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Here, she weaves her family's story with her state's, from Alabama's forced removal of the Creek Nation, making room for enslaved West Africans, to present-day legislative battles for "evolution disclaimers" in biology textbooks. She immerses us in a landscape today dominated not by cotton fields but by auto plants and Amazon warehouses. Defying stereotypes at every turn, Okeowo shows how people can love their home while still acknowledging its sins.
In this perspective-shifting work that is both an intimate memoir and a journalistic triumph, Okeowo investigates her life, other Alabamians' lives, and the state's lesser-known histories, to examine why Alabama has been the stage for the most extreme results of the American experiment.
"In this extraordinary book, Alexis Okeowo examines Alabama as only someone who grew up there could, with care, with criticism, with hope. Here, our much maligned state, the butt of the joke, the example of what not to do, looks much more like what I knew it to be growing up―complex, yes, but also, simply, just like every other state in a union that continues to grapple with its sordid past." ―Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom
This information about Blessings and Disasters 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.
Alexis Okeowo is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a fellow at New America. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Financial Times, Time, and Fortune, among many other publications. The daughter of immigrant parents, Okeowo grew up in Alabama and attended Princeton University. She was based in Lagos, Nigeria, from 2012 to 2015, and now lives in Brooklyn.
Name Pronunciation
Alexis Okeowo: uh-KAY-uh-woh
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