Baratunde Thurston takes a really amazing approach to race in this book, which is appropriate for a book with such a lofty title as "How to Be Black," the amazing thing is that he aims high and he hits his target. The book is part comedy, part autobiography and part instruction manual on race relations in the United States. It is one of the better comedy books that I've read in a long time and he manages to integrate his own experience and life story pretty seamlessly into the different sections of the book. Like the best "Onion" articles, I found myself quoting it in conversation or pulling the book out and reading whole sections to helpless people.
My one complaint is that sometimes the other contributors to the book (his "panel of experts") didn't fit in quite perfectly. I assume this is due to the nature of the way they were collected (I believe they were interviews rather than written essays) or possibly an issue of editing. I want to emphasize that I actually enjoyed all of the contributors thoughts and thought they all were interesting and funny, I just felt that they were sometimes unnecessary or slightly awkward to the rest of the text.
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