Mik Awake

“When Chadwick Boseman died from colon cancer, Ibram X. Kendi, one of the country’s most renowned historians of racism, felt moved to speak up about his own fight against a disease that disproportionately afflicts Black men. He decided to reveal the scars from his own surgery—to wear them as visible signs of triumph over adversity. Here, alongside six other patients and survivors, he bares his wounds—and reckons with the disease’s lasting effects on his body and his spirit.”

“I know that book collections become a pantomime of erudition, or a flex, as I often think when walking past the lit windows of tony brownstones in Brooklyn and catch sight of a large built-in bookcase. And yet when I have ever passed one without the tug of desire?”