Fresh Air - Scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. reflects on America at 250

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Glaude's book, 'America, U.S.A.,' looks at the country through the lens of its previous anniversaries and centennials. Today, as in the past, he tells Tonya Mosley, "the divided soul of the nation is in full view." As the 250th anniversary approaches, he says it's time for the U.S. to acknowledge the ways it has failed to deliver on its founding principles. "America has to grow up. It can no longer hide in its adolescence," he says.Also, Maureen Corrigan recommends three books to help you jump into summer reading.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Eddie Glaw, Jr. He's a professor at Princeton and a familiar voice on the country's hardest conversations about race and democracy. He's the author of Begin Again, Lessons from the late James Baldwin, and we are the leaders we've been looking for. Those books look clearly at this country's failures, but still held onto something hopeful. But his latest book set sentimentality aside. It's called America. USA, how race shadows the nation's anniversaries. In it, Glaw, it takes us to the country's big birthdays, 1876, 1926, and now the 250th, and shows us the same ritual each time. The nation throws itself a party and quietly edits out the parts of the story it cannot bear to face. He goes back to 1876, the centennial, with Frederick Douglass watching the promise of emancipation. come undone. And he argues that what happened then is happening again now. It's a book written in grief and rage, and underneath both, a stubborn kind of love of country. We spoke earlier this month in Seattle on stage at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, a day-long gathering of journalists

and thinkers hosted by Seattle's public media station. Here's our conversation. I am so honored to be in conversation with you for so many I've had the pleasure of talking with you many times, our first time, though, in person with each other. And I think a great way to start is to actually have you read a passage from the book. Let's start with the very first page. Sure. But before I started reading, I want to just say how honored I am to be in conversation with you. To have an opportunity to talk about this book and this moment with you is so meaningful to me.

So here it is. Bitterness at the bottom of the cup. I do not love America and never have, especially now. It seems to me misplaced or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious. Love is most often felt and experienced close to the ground, and the life lived in a particular place in time and in memories that take up residence in the heart. I suspect love of country is shorthand for the heartfelt relationships and experiences that make us who we are. Things that happen in the place we call home, no matter how complicated that place may be.

James Baldwin was right. Whoever's part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it and some of the people in it. And I suppose that is why, in part, we are willing to risk our lives in defense of this place and of what it might become. But in America, those feelings and experiences have always been stained by the ugliness of what white people believe about color. That somehow or in some inscrutable way, the color of one's skin determines your value. You end up spending much of your life trying to prove to others and to yourself, not because you are obsessed with white people, but because you want to live, that you are not an inward. Some Americans may believe that this view is a relic of a past that we have long left behind.

After all, they might say, we elected a black president and vice president. Look how far we've come. Stop complaining, I hear them say, you teach at Princeton University. You are not a victim. But I speak from the experience of a life lived in this country. And I trust what I know, what I've seen, and what now sits in the pit of my stomach. When did that sentence, I do not love America, become true to you? When did you consciously realize that that was a truth for you?

I had written some version of the introduction. And it didn't land. I thought I was holding something back. And so, you know, writing is mostly about revision. And so I returned to that first paragraph, and suddenly this sentence just came on the page. And I got up and I started walking around my study. And I was afraid of what this would mean if I left it there. And then almost as if, you know, something inside of my head just simply said,

but this is what you have to say. You have to begin here, and then you can explain it. So I left it there. And I decided, you know, in this time, you have to be courageous and vulnerable and daring. And I couldn't. And truthful. Yeah, exactly. One of the things that struck me from the very beginning of this book was that I realized I wasn't reading.

from the same man who wrote Begin Again. Because in Begin Again, which is a previous book of yours, you use James Baldwin's work to kind of beat back despair. And in this book in particular, I felt that optimism of a truth-teller, of a freedom fighter, it was gone. Yeah, yeah. Am I right in that feeling? In the same way that Langston Hughes, we felt in his later words,

writings in and in James Baldwin. Yeah, so in so many ways, I'm arguing with Jimmy. In notes of a native son, Baldwin says, you know, I love my country more than anything. And because of that love, I reserve the right to criticize it relentlessly, to paraphrasing. I never begin there. I didn't begin there. Maybe it's because I'm from Mississippi, you know. But unrageful.

There are moments when I'm not. I'm battling depression because the country has done this again. At the end of beginning again, I said, well, you know, we can, we have to make a choice, right? Will we do this or that? And we have a choice to put this moment behind us and look what we did. And now people have to raise their children in the midst of this. They've gutted the Voting Rights Act, the redrawing districts. We're in the midst of what could very well be described as a second redemption, a second lost cause.

And, you know, the last sentence of the book speaks that emotion. And so what I was trying to do with this book was kind of right some security underneath my feet. Right. So that I could actually get this rage under control to get my sadness, my melancholia under control. Why anniversaries is a way to look at this country's relationship with race? You could have chosen court cases. You could have chosen lots of different ways. What is it about our nation's anniversaries that allow us to see the problem so clearly?

So at each of these moments, the country has to tell a story about itself. It has to tell a story about its founding. And so here we are in the 250th. And look at the kinds of the contours of the story. Just don't look at the UFC arena. or the Great American Fair, or the Garden of Statues of Heroes. But they're going to tell a story.

It's going to be a particular story where the greatest nation in the history of the world. It's going to be a story about the saintliness of the founders or a story about the sacredness of this grand experiment. In each of these anniversaries, the nation has to tell a story about itself, about its founding. And in each of these moments, Tony,

The country is struggling and grappling with its contradiction. In each of these moments, the divided soul of the nation is in full view. Du Bois in 1903 wrote The Souls of Black Folk. And in the Souls of Black Folk, he says, that black folk see themselves through the eyes of those who despise them. This is what he called double consciousness. But I believe that double consciousness is actually a consequence of the double consciousness of the nation. that America imagines itself at once

as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And to hold those two things together with, you can't really, without contradiction. And it deposits a kind of madness at the heart of the country. And we see it evidenced every single milestone anniversary, 1876, 1926,

and by God, 250 years later, 2026. I want to talk with you in particular about two moments, 1926, 1976, but I'm very curious about the title, America, comma, USA. Why both of those in the title? Yeah, you know, usually it's not a comma, it's a hyphen. Yes.

The Italian-American, the, the, the Irish American, you know, the black American, African American, the hyphen gives us a sense of the kind of, the idea of America best represented by Ellis Island, yes? We need to remind the Trump administration about Ellis Island, right? But the comma signals a break, not connection. And so America, USA actually reflects the divided soul of the country. And so part of what I'm doing is signifying on these attempts to tell the story of America and trying to capture in the title by way of the comma, the divided soul, the double consciousness that haunts this place.

And you're talking about the anniversaries and all of the pomp and circumstance. As I'm reading your book, don't laugh at this, but that song, God bless the USA, proud to be an American, because at least I know I'm free. And as I'm reading the words in your book, for the first time those words, at least I know I'm free, kept coming back up for me. And I wonder what's your relationship

to patriotism overall and to that idea of us holding such reverence and such pride in this myth and this idea of a freedom being something that could be bestowed upon us. Yeah. Patriotism. You know, the first sentence,

what it's trying to do is hold off idolatry. The idolatry of the state, right? Something so morally dubious and so abstract, right? And sometimes, and I'll say this,

and I wonder what you think about this. But sometimes patriotism to my ear sounds like a rebel yell. Say more. Those people who who embrace the flag, who wrap themselves up in the piety of the country, are often more than not folk who think I should be in my place. Folk who are behind the assault on voting rights,

folk who want to deny the specificity of the experience that shape how I see this place. So usually when I hear a robust, visceral embrace of love of country, You know, my head goes on a swivel. Who's saying it and for what ends and for what purposes, you see. We've always served as a kind of counter to the myth, to the illusion that this place is a beacon of freedom. Us meaning black folks.

Yes, yes. John, just think about John Adams. This is an apocryful story, but John Adams supposedly said to King George, We will not be your Negroes. At the very moment in which he's given voice to a notion of freedom, it's based on an intimate understanding of unfreedom, us. In the early days of July 4th,

if we showed up to the July 4th celebrations, like the July days of 1834 in New York, we would literally be physically attacked because our bodies represented the contradiction of what was being said. We have a counter. calendar, what I call a counter, alternative commemorative calendar around freedom. While the nation is celebrating itself as the embodiment of freedom, we are celebrating January 1st. Why? Because

January 1st, 1808 was the day that they ended the transatlantic slave trade. We're celebrating in August, West Indian Emancipation Day. Why? Because it's the end of slavery. We celebrate the most important of all of those days in the early 19th century is July 5th. Douglas is, Douglas is famous July 5th, 1852 oration stands in a tradition. Why, July 5th is the abolition of slavery in the state of New York. Juneteeth stands in that tradition where we're giving voice to a notion of freedom over and against a country that embraces the idea of freedom, but doesn't quite live it in practice. I want to spend some real time on two of the anniversaries that sit on top of each other. So 1876 and 19.

So 1876 is where you note that racial justice starts to get treated as philanthropy. Yeah. It's a gift that white people can extend and also withdraw rather than something that is owed. Can you talk more about that and why this reframe of understanding this is so important as we read through your book and your ideas? Yeah. Well, I'm trying to figure out this cycle. Why is it that we're always returning to this? What's going on?

And one of the ways I've resolved it is that, or I haven't resolved the cycle of the way in which I describe it, is, okay, if America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic, and if you can't hold those things without contradiction, how do you finesse it? Well, you finesse it by assuming that white people possess freedom to give and to take away. Oh, let me be clear now before people get uncomfortable.

When I say white people, I'm talking at a certain level of generality. This is my reading of James Baldwin. Baldwin will say, I happen to love, and I say this, I happen to love a lot of people who happen to be white, and then they're white people. The point is that we all bear the burden of racialization. We're all socialized in this way in which these categories matter to how we see ourselves and understand ourselves, right? So those people believe that they possess freedom to give and to take away. And so what we see is anti-slavery movement, right? Folk are fighting against slavery and they are arguing that this contradicts their commitment to principles of equality and liberty and democracy and the like. And then once the Civil War amendments are passed, particularly the one that ends slavery

the 13th Amendment, what do we get this debate about whether or not these folk can bear the burden and responsibility of citizenship? So you see folk who were once, right, anti-slavery, become, right, folk who are arguing against extending citizenship to black folk. So 1876 is this moment. Douglas is, Frederick Douglass is grappling with this. He's an example of these freedom snatchers, these people who believe that they can give freedom and to take away.

He was born in slavery. He escaped. He witnessed Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the ratification of the 13th, 14th, the 15th Amendments, and he lived long enough to see Jim Crow. He called these folk the apostles of forgetfulness. And then he would say, and he said in 1875, I don't want your alms, I want justice. He's skeptical of people who want to do something for us,

as opposed to with us. And so 1876 is this extraordinary moment, Tanya, when the country engages for the first time after the carnage of the Civil War in a national remembrance of his founding and it engages in this horrific act at scale of disremembering. Frederick Douglas was actually invited

to be on the dais with President Grant. He's trying to get in. This is in Philadelphia, not in Philadelphia, Mississippi, but Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Yes. He's trying to get in. He shows the Philadelphia police officer

his ticket, which puts him on the dais. The officer says there's no way an inward should be on the dais with President Grant. He would not allow him in. If it wasn't for a senator who sees him, Senator Conklin, I believe, who sees him and then escorts him in, Frederick Douglass would not have been able to even enter the exposition. Then they sit him on the stage, the most famous orator in the United States at the time, they sit him on the stage and he cannot say a word. He's just there. Silent. So there's this disremembering that's happening as the country barrels towards the end of the 19th century. With the violence of these coups that are taking place, political coups that are taking place

in Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia against the backdrop of the horror that will leave over 53,000 black people dead by the end of the 19th century, the country tells itself a story about the grandness of the American project. My mama. My guest is Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr. To accompany his new book, Glawed worked with classical composer Joel Thompson to create music to capture what Glawd sees as the spirit of the nation.

Here's pianist Leah Claiborne, performing the piece called Anne Blue. That was Leah Claiborne performing Anne Blue. More of our conversation with scholar Eddie Glaw, Jr. after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley. and this is fresh air. I'm thinking about 2020 when we all seem to be coming to this same realization

in the same way that we found during Reconstruction where, oh, we understand the ills, we want to right the wrongs, and the white allies are in our corner and they believe us and they're speaking truth to power as well. And then something happens.

Like the idea of it being a philanthropic effort, this idea that you can put it on the shelf and then you can take it off the shelf when it comes to racial equality. Yeah, yeah. Sentimentality. At the heart of this idea that certain people think that they possess freedom

to give and to take away is the cycle of sentimentality and rage. You cry your crocodile tears. I remember writing this passage, trying to figure it out, just five years ago, six years ago, we were in the midst of a racial reckoning. I was crying on national television

about George Floyd and the like. In the blink of an eye, we're here. In the blink of an eye. And the only thing I could conclude is that people were lying. You weren't telling the truth. Or you didn't have any way. else to land. And you just return back, return to the status quo. And so I was trying to

describe it in a way. Drawing on Baldwin's notion of sentimentality and Oscar Wilde and others, right, that sentimentality is really just, you know, about your own individual feelings. Baldwin says it's the mask of cruelty. Right? You cry, you're cracket out tears for us. Oh, we want to do this for you. We're going to make sure we're going to resolve ourselves. We're going to absolve ourselves of our sins by actually engaging in this effort. We're going to tell the truth about what we've done. And then when the people who bear the brunt of what we've done continue to ask for justice, then the question becomes, what else do you want?

We've given you enough. Overreach. How much more are you going to ask? And as soon as you hear those questions, We're on the cusp of the backlash, the rage. And here we are, because sentimentality carries with it, rage. Uncle Tom, you know, who's the flip side of Uncle Tom? Nat Turner.

Yes, yes. Same side of the same coin in our imaginations. Yes. I'm thinking we're being too hard. Y'all all right? You sure? I'm just checking on. This is Seattle, okay?

I'm just checking on it. It's not. We can go there. You could go there with Seattleite. I'm just checking on him. Yeah. I want to go back to Frederick Douglass, though, 1876. It's the centennial, as you said, it's the nation's 100th birthday. He is turned away initially.

And he is the most famous black man in America at the time. He's watching it all collapse around him. Take me, in particular, though, to July 5th. Yeah. 1875, what was he contending with as he's preparing to see? speak. Yeah, and, you know, usually we talk about July 5th, 1852 when he delivers that famous July 5th address in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. But in 1875, the old man has to figure out what he's going to say to the country, what he's going to say to these people in Metropolitan Church.

And he knew exactly what was going to happen come 1876. They would tell the story of the grandness of the American project. And it so mirrors our day. But here's that moment. Douglas says, and I always get choked up when I said, we gained our freedom through the falling out of white men. Now we must brace ourselves. I'm paraphrasing for what will happen now that they've reconciled.

What we must brace ourselves for what's to come. Yes. And it's a powerful speech, so, so much so, that I try to pull it forward by the time I get to 2025. And I'm trying to write to the 26 celebration. Yes. I was surprised to know that you went to school in Philadelphia, but you had never really taken tours of all of the landmarks. But you decide to take a tour of Independence Hall, what was it, like, 2024? so not that long ago.

And you're on this tour and you're hearing this tour guy tell a story. And what's interesting about that time period is there was a lot of effort that went into making it diverse to kind of show a more perfect union. And you're noticing something very specific as you're going through this tour. What did you find?

Well, it's a storybook version of America, right? And he's talking, he's taking us through the Congress Hall, right? And I've never been a tourist. I could go, I go overseas and I stay at my hotel and read books. My wife hates.

So I'm in Philly. I never go to the Liberty Bell or any of that stuff. But here I wanted to return to it. And he's telling the story. And he looks like a, he's cosplaying a kind of drill sergeant. He has his, you know,

four street outfit on. And he's walking. us through the House and then the Senate, and he's telling us these stories and finally he talks about the conflict between, that they weren't divided according to party, but a region and whatnot. And so the biggest conflict is that they came from the South and the North. And I was like, okay, here we go. We're going to start talking about slavery. Yes.

Got it. And then he says, they didn't know how to shake hands. That was the example of the conflict. between the Congress persons that they didn't one would bow and one of the and I was like that's it we're not gonna and so and then I just saw ghosts I saw ghosts all around Congress Hall you know purse-lipped-lip ghosts right but it was an example for me a startling example of the storybook version of the country because in that very building, Congress decided by only one person voted,

decided to maintain the fugitive slave law. Yes. And Moses Gordon's story is located right in that moment. Talk a little bit about Moses Gordon. Moses Gordon was, you see how good she is? Moses Gordon was enslaved and manumitted in 1776, just three months after the signing of the Declaration. of Independence. In North Carolina, his slave master was Caleb Trueblood, a Quaker. And for two years, Moses Gordon lived as a free man, but the colony or the, you know, South, North Carolina had

passed a statute saying that you could not manumet your slaves unless for a meritorious service, unless they fought in the Revolutionary War. So Moses Gordon was captured two years later and sold back into slavery. And he freedom dreamed. And then he escaped. And he escaped to Philadelphia. And for 10 years, he lived as a free man. But because of the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793,

Moses Gordon was a thief because he stole himself. He belonged to the man to whom he was sold, Brigadier General William Skinner. And 10 years later, he was captured, put in shackles, and was to be sent back to North Carolina. In the papers of John Parrish, a Quaker abolitionist at Haverford College, reside are the main mission papers of Moses Gordon. And on the back, John Parrish wrote,

instead of returning to slavery, Moses Gordon committed suicide. And that becomes a story of freedom snatcher. He was freed, enslaved, escaped, captured, death. And it becomes a through line. We're listening to the conversation I had on stage with Eddie Glawd Jr. at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival. Glaw's new book is America, USA. More of our conversation after a break. This is fresh air. I want to take us now to 1976, because this is a time period where you and I are alive, we're coming of age. How old were you in 1976? Eight.

You were eight years old. Yeah. It's the bisonable. centennial. And the question has shifted by then. This is the apex of white flight, the thick of desegregation fights. And it's the first time, as you write in your book, that the nation is forced to kind of acknowledge black history. But the question isn't whether black freedom should be retracted. It's whether we should participate at all in the bicentennial. Can you talk briefly about that? Sure. You know, it's just, I remember as, well, I have a photo. I have a vague memory of me being in red, white, and blue pants. How kitschy the 76 bicentennial celebration was, you know, from red, white, and blue whoopee cushions to a range of things. But this is a celebration, really, of white ethnics in 1976.

Remember 1926? There is this real intense debate around immigration. And this is such an interesting point in history, because this is where immigrants have the ability to become white. They have a choice to make. And as black people, we sit very squarely in that because we're representative of what? The journey of the country itself, right? But, you know, 1926, you know, if you're from Italy, you're from Ireland, you're Jewish, you're from the asshole countries of Europe, right? The clan can't stand. they are as much against Irish Catholic's Catholicism in particular

as they are against black people in the 1920s. But by 1976, their children are claiming the revolution as their own. Black folk are still arguing we're in this moment of deep dissenses, Tanya. Watergate, Vietnam, black power, the black students, SDS, there's all of this deep suspicion in scandinance. about the country. And so the bicentennial is supposed to be this ritual that's going to bring us together over and against all of this conflict and discord that's defined the decade of the 60s and the early part of the 70s. And it's just the first year because in 1926 is the first time Negro History Week is celebrated in 1926. 1976 Negro History Week becomes Black History Month. President Ford recognizes and acknowledges Negro History Week and then Black History Week. Month. But there's this debate because black folk are still struggling.

Ought we to celebrate this? Because what's happening is that instead of disappearing black history, black history is being absorbed into the story of America to affirm America's inherent goodness. So you write about the Reagan years. This is the time period where we start talking about like color blindness. It's a sort of It parts black history to fit into this fairy tale, but we're still kind of off to the side. It's not integrated into the full story. What so makes this moment so crazy

is that they don't even accept the redacted version of our story. Mm-hmm. So Reagan signs MLK holiday into law. Barack Obama becomes the kind of culmination of that, right? Even so much so he can tell the story of the march on Washington in such a way. that affirms the possibility of American life.

We lost our way with black power, but no, no, no, no. This is what we're doing. The mage folk don't even want that to be a part of the story. But what we see in this moment is this absorption of black history as an affirmation of the inherent goodness of the country. So our story is blunted. It doesn't provide a critique. Right? Instead, right, the country can tell our story and pat itself on the back.

Look at you. Look at me. Exceptionalism. Look how far we've come. Yep. Look how decent we are. Right? And then, in the blink of an eye, we find ourselves here. You call this book an analogy.

It's pitched in the note of a moment of. the blues, but I want to know very quickly why the blues is the right form of the story of America at this 250th anniversary. And I'm going to double this question as well to ask you what you will be doing on July 4th or July 5th. Why the blues and what am I going to be doing? America has to grow up. It can't, it can no longer hide. in its adolescence. You know, when grown folk act like kids, they're monstrous, more often than not.

And so it keeps telling itself this story that affirms its innocence and what the blues does. The blues, right, takes you to the heart of the problem. B.B. King's, nobody loves you but to my mother, and she can be jiving, too. It offers a tragic sense of the world. Right? We don't have to be all angels, right? The devil and the angel is in us.

So all we need to do is to look in the mirror. So we need to grow up. Because if you don't grow up, you can bomb Iran and then tell somebody else to fix it. If you don't grow up, you can do all of this evil in these detention centers, in these black sites, and not hold anybody responsible, right? You can become complicit with evil because you are by definition innocent. So the country has to sing the blues. And you know what? We've deposited it there since we got here.

That's the thing you talk about, too, is like, we aren't just a part of American history. We are interwoven into the very meaning of what this country is. It's on our tongue. It's in our food. We have met your country. No, no. We, in the fullness of our diversity, make this place

swing. So on July 4th and July 5th, we need to show the full diversity of America and claim the country as our own. Eddie Glaude, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for this conversation. When you say, I do not love this country, actually this book is a love letter to America. Oh, you got me. Yes, thank you. Eddie Glaude Jr., author of America, USA, how race shadows the nation's anniversaries. After a short break, book critic Marine Corrigan reviews some spring releases on her summer reading list. This is fresh air. For our book critic Marine Corrigan, summer reading, sometimes means catching up on the books she missed earlier in the year.

Here's her short roundup of some spring books. I love reviewing books, but sometimes the pace of reading them can feel like that classic I Love Lucy episode at the Chocolate Factory. The conveyor belt speeds up and the books keep coming along faster than they can be wrapped in a review. Summer gives me a chance to catch up with some good books that whizzed by in spring. James Lazzden, the family man, came out the first week of May, which is when I read it. This nonfiction book, which grew out of a piece Lazzden wrote for the New Yorker, is about the investigation and conviction of prominent South Carolina lawyer Alec Murdoch for the 2021 murders of his wife and adult son.

Then came the real-life plot twist. A little over a week after Lazzden's book was published, Murdoch's conviction was overturned because of Jordan. jury tampering. A retrial is being scheduled. Rather than rendering the family man obsolete, this new twist intensifies the miasma of stories that swirl around the Murdoch case, including suspicious deaths and embezzlement. Lassden is a true crime writer in the reflective mold of his late New Yorker colleague Janet Malcolm. Although investigating the double murder case drives this narrative. Lazzden is most interested in exploring the ultimate

unsolvable mystery, the mystery of evil. Harriet Clark's debut novel, The Hill, which came out in May, has been getting tons of deserved praise. The novel draws explicitly from Clark's own background. Born in 1980, Clark was 11 months old when her mother, a member of the Radical Weather Underground, was arrested and sentenced for her involvement in a Brinks armored truck robbery that resulted in the deaths of three men. Clark's maternal grandparents got custody, and she visited her mother in prison for almost 40 years before she was paroled in 2019. Clark's main character, Susanna, is eight when the story begins and living with her grandparents, former members of the American Communist Party. The plot here is a marvel of sustained claustrophobic stasis. Every week, Susanna is taken, first by her grandfather, then by a nun, then on her own,

to visit her mother in the Children's Center in Hillcrest, prison. Susanna's voice charges this novel with intelligence. Listen. Each week, my mother fixed and refixed my hair. I slept and didn't sleep. Around us, women counted down to release. But my mother and I had been released from countdowns. No reason to look forward. No interest in looking back. We were, as I saw it, free of the past and free of the future. Carnival Day, Friendship Day, Birthday Day, the holidays followed their own lelting rhythms, and eventually we submitted again to the lull and pleasures of our timeless life. All the while I was reading The Hill, I kept thinking of E.L. Dr. Rose, the Book of Daniel,

inspired by the Rosenberg case. The two novels differ in scope, but, like, Like Doctoro, Clark interrogates the cost of parents' radical commitment on their children, as well as how the world itself shifts radically from generation to generation. Sometimes I put aside a good book for a bad reason. Mary Costello's slim novel, A Beautiful Loan, touted as a devastating story about relationships, came out in March. No, I thought back then, not another Erzat's Sally Rooney in time for St. Patrick's Day. But one empty afternoon, I picked it up and kept reading, mostly because the present tense narration of the main character Anna struck me as so weird in tone.

Her deadened voice was at odds with her emotional turbulence. Here's 19-year-old Anna, summarizing how Paul, an elusive older man shall eventually marry, keeps her enthrall to what she calls this oscillating life. In the middle of the night, he rises on one elbow in the bed beside me, and in an urgent, desperate voice says, I love you. In the morning, he makes no reference to this, and I think he must have spoken in his sleep. Never again in our lives together will he say those three words. A beautiful loan spans 25 years and Anna's obsessive devotion to two men, one dog, the writings of Camus and Young, and the practice of Islam. Like the other two books

I've caught up with here, it may not be the ideal beach read, but it would be perfect for a washout of a summer weekend. Marine Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed The Family Man by James Laston, The Hill by Harriet Clark, and a beautiful loan by Mary Costello. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, as we approach America's 250th birthday, writer Jesse Wegman, tells the forgotten story of James Wilson, a brilliant 18th century lawyer who played a critical role in crafting the Constitution, pushing for a strong federal government and the direct election of lawmakers. Wegman's book is the Lost Founder. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldinato, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challoner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesfer. Roberta Shorak directs the show.

With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.