Not Even Past
Barack Obama and the Burden of Race
by Thomas J. Sugrue
ISBN: 9780691137308
$24.95 Hardcover
Princeton University Press

In his acclaimed campaign speech discussing the troubling complexities of race in America today, Barack Obama quoted William Faulkner's famous remark, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." Now, in Not Even Past, award-winning historian Thomas J. Sugrue examines the paradox of race in Obama's America and how President Obama intends to deal with it.

"In this brilliant work of contemporary history, Thomas Sugrue vividly reconstructs the America in which Barack Obama came of age, and expertly probes the varied political and intellectual influences that have shaped our president's thinking about race and civil rights. No one has written about the complexities of racial politics or Obama's racial compromises with more skill, insight, or erudition."--*Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century