The Grace of Silence: A Family Memoir

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star. A profoundly moving and deeply personal memoir by the co-host of National Public Radios flagship program All Things Considered. While exploring the hidden conversation on race unfolding throughout America in the wake of President Obamas election, Michele Norris discovered that there were painful secrets within her own family that had been willfully withheld. These revelationsfrom her fathers shooting by a Birmingham police officer to her maternal grandmothers job as an itinerant Aunt Jemima in the Midwestinspired a bracing journey into her familys past, from her childhood home in Minneapolis to her ancestral roots in the Deep South. The result is a rich and extraordinary family memoirfilled with stories that elegantly explore the power of silence and secretsthat boldly examines racial legacy and what it means to be an American.