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Articles by David Wright Faladé
“Amarillo Boulevard,” by David Wright Faladé
When Jean and her fiancé arrived at the Jamesons’, the Juneteenth goings on were already in full swing. The back yard brimmed with raucous laughter and talk of high-school sporting successes and the tribulations of the Dallas Cowboys. Old-school R. & B. groaned from speakers in a propped-open window, Bill Withers’s lament about the absence of sun at odds with the big Texas sky and the garish heat. Mrs.
The New Internationals
The turbulent economic and political maelstrom of Paris in 1947 serves as an apt setting for this character-driven novel of young people from different cultures, who are coming to maturity and looking to the future in the aftermath of the city’s occupation in WWII.
JBC Bookshelf: Winter 2025
Skip to main content Join us in showing your commitment to Jewish books and authors. Learn more about the 99th Jewish Book Month celebration campaign here. Jewish Book Council, founded in 1943, is the longest-running organization devoted exclusively to the support and celebration of Jewish literature. Get the latest reviews, news, and more in your inbox.
Black Cloud Rising
Our country’s racial history, often portrayed as black and white, has never been, well, black and white. That’s as true now as it was in the decades before, during, and after the Civil War. Its complexities are fully on display in the riveting new Black Cloud Rising.
Our 51 Favorite Books of 2022
Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo (Grove Press). Reviewed by Kitty Kelley. “The last section of her book, entitled ‘The self, ambition, transformation, activism,’ echoes the principles of Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, M.D., which was published in 1960 and sold over 30 million copies. The biracial British writer and the late Jewish American physician share the same philosophy: Envision the goal, believe you can accomplish the goal, and then achieve the goal.
PHOTOS: Kentucky mens soccer defeats Seattle 1-0
Kentucky Wildcats midfielder Casper Grening (10) kicks the ball during the Kentucky vs. Seattle mens soccer match on Monday, Aug. 29, 2022, at the Wendell and Vickie Bell Soccer Complex in Lexington, Kentucky. UK won 1-0. Photo by Jack Weaver | Staff
The Truth About My Father
Though Dahomey was smaller than New Jersey, with a population of three hundred and fifty thousand by some estimates, three-quarters that of Staten Island’s today, it is believed that about fifteen per cent of all the slaves sent to the Americas departed from this stretch of coast—nearly two million women, men, and children. Those sold off resisted the spiritual death that could accompany enslavement, striving to retain some tie to their past.
AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of February
Each month, for your literary listening pleasure, our friends at AudioFile Magazine bring us the cream of the audiobook crop. This month’s trove of aural treasures includes Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (read by Gilli Messer & Allen Lewis Rickman), Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues (read by Dion Graham), Ben Raines’ The Last Slave Ship (read by Kevin R. Free), and Imani Perry’s South to America (read by the author).
‹ AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of February Book Marks
Each month, for your literary listening pleasure, our friends at AudioFile Magazine bring us the cream of the audiobook crop. This month’s trove of aural treasures includes Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob (read by Gilli Messer & Allen Lewis Rickman), Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues (read by Dion Graham), Ben Raines’ The Last Slave Ship (read by Kevin R. Free), and Imani Perry’s South to America (read by the author).
BLACK CLOUD RISING
James Shippy impeccably narrates this little known event in Civil War history. One-armed abolitionist General Edward Wild led the African Brigade to rout Confederate irregulars and bushwhackers to free Virginians and North Carolinians who were still enslaved. Listeners meet Wild's contingent of formerly enslaved people. Most interesting is highly educated Sergeant Richard Etheridge, the Black son of a white slaveholder.
Summary and Reviews of Black Cloud Rising by David Wright Falade
About This Book Summary Excerpt Book Club Questions Book Summary Black Cloud Rising is a compelling and important historical novel that takes us back to an extraordinary moment when enslaved men and women were shedding their bonds and embracing freedom. By fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia, and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer Banks.
Washington Independent Review of Books
Men in My Situation: A Novel by Per Petterson; translated by Ingvild Burkey (Graywolf Press). Reviewed by Mike Maggio. “It’s not often a novel comes along that explores the vicissitudes of the male psyche, especially as they relate to those inner moments that deal with love and loss. Men are typically depicted as strong, successful, and cocksure. In romances, they may be portrayed as rugged or macho. In mysteries, as cool and cunning.
Washington Independent Review of Books
Our country’s racial history, often portrayed as black and white, has never been, well, black and white. That’s as true now as it was in the decades before, during, and after the Civil War. Its complexities are fully on display in the riveting new Black Cloud Rising.
David Wright Faladé on the Case for Civil War Revisionism in Film and Literature
In a pivotal scene in the 1989 film Glory, the story’s hero, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, confronts his commanding officer, Colonel James Montgomery, who has ordered his black soldiers to sack and burn an undefended Confederate village. Matthew Broderick’s Shaw and his “colored volunteers” (Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Andre Braugher) watch in outrage as their counterparts, a unit composed of very recently freed slaves, are let loose on the town.
A Rousing Novel Follows a Brigade of Black Soldiers in the Civil War
In “Black Cloud Rising,” David Wright Faladé tells a classic war story based on a unit of soldiers, including many newly released slaves, that helped to hunt down rebel guerrillas in 1863. Feb. 14, 2022, 2:30 p.m. ET BLACK CLOUD RISING By David Wright Faladé 290 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $27.
Black Cloud Rising
DEBUT In this profoundly reflective novel, Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award winner Faladé ( Fire on the Beach) uses real-life Civil War sergeant Richard Etheridge to explore the immediate consequences of emancipation. In autumn 1863, thousands of formerly enslaved men joined the ranks of the Union Army as it capitalized on its Tidewater Virginia foothold by eying eastern North Carolina, where Confederate irregulars still lurked.
By David Wright Faladé.
Black Cloud Rising By David Wright Faladé. Feb. 2022. 304p. Atlantic Monthly, $27 (9780802159199). REVIEW. First published November 1, 2021 (Booklist). The role of Black soldiers in the Civil War remains underchronicled. Faladé’s tensely wrought first novel is set during a critical time in 1863, just after the Emancipation Proclamation, when those enslaved by unrepentant secessionists were liberated and fled to join freedmen’s colonies or enlist in the Union army.
A Drive Across the Lone-Star State
My stepdad was a taciturn man and a disciplinarian. He’d grown up in Jim Crow South Carolina and had found a way out through the military, where he was awarded medals for his service in Vietnam. When he retired, he took our family to Borger, a Texas Panhandle town of fifteen thousand whose sheriff had recruited him to be a deputy, the first Black one. We moved into a three-bedroom ranch in Keeler Heights, a white neighborhood. Most of Borger’s few Black residents lived across town, in the Flats.
“The Sand Banks, 1861”
Audio: David Wright Faladé reads. We were just boys, ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds, five colored and one white. But for our smallclothes, each of us was most-all naked. We stood on the rickety reach of pier, its planks care-laid but well used, us colored boys’ black glistening in the noontime bright, the white one not yet leathered like the sunbeat beefs that free-ranged the island.
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