Mychal Denzel Smith

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

California

Life after the American Dream

Winner of the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction



Brave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future.



The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our path, the promise that hard work and determination will carry us to freedom. But in Stakes Is High, Mychal Denzel Smith confronts the shortcomings of these stories -- and with the American Dream itself -- and calls on us to live up to the principles we profess but fail to realize.
 
In a series of incisive essays, Smith exposes the stark contradictions at the heart of American life, holding all of us, individually and as a nation, to account. We've gotten used to looking away, but the fissures and casual violence of institutional oppression are ever-present.
 
There is a future that is not as grim as our past. In this profound work, Smith helps us envision it with care, honesty, and imagination.

Stakes Is High

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Oregon

A Young Black Man's Education

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching

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Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Texas

Like New condition. Spine unbroken, smoked free home. 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Maryland

Utah

Louisiana

New Jersey

North Carolina

Vermont

New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. It means witnessing the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and too many more. It means celebrating powerful moments of black self-determination for LeBron James, Dave Chappelle, and Frank Ocean. In Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, Mychal Denzel Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years, describing his efforts to come into his own in a world that denied his humanity. Smith unapologetically upends reigning assumptions about black masculinity, rewriting the script for black manhood so that depression and anxiety aren't considered taboo, and feminism and LGBTQ rights become part of the fight. The questions Smith asks in this book are urgent--for him, for the martyrs and the tokens, and for the Trayvons that could have been and are still waiting.

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Mychal Denzel Smith

Stakes Is High

Mychal Denzel Smith

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching

Mychal Denzel Smith

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching

Mychal Denzel Smith

Stakes Is High

Mychal Denzel Smith

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching

Mychal Denzel Smith

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching

Mychal Denzel Smith

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching

Mychal Denzel Smith

Stakes Is High

Mychal Denzel Smith

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching