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Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
"Infused with righteous indignation and astute observation, this is a must-read progressive polemic."
"America's troubled times require action, to be sure."
"Journalist Smith (Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, 2016) takes on the failure and possibility of the American dream in this slim, impactful book."
"A young Black man surveys the landscape and finds America a poisonous, broken place—but perhaps not irretrievably so ..."
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