McMillan Cottom has a distinct voice, and she integrates her personal life with her societal analysis in powerful ways in this collection. Recommended to everyone and also fans of Roxane Gay, Brittney Cooper, and Rebecca Solnit. She applies this insight to an expanse of subjects, including how black women do not get positions at high prestige publications, in which she analyzes David Brooks's Twitter follows to highlight how few people in positions of power listen to black women. I loved how she always took her analysis one step further, like in her essay about beauty, how she refutes the neoliberal idea that we are all beautiful, and she instead asserts that we should question why we value beauty and who profits from determining what we consider beautiful. Tressie McMillan Cottom addresses many topics within the realm of black womanhood, including beauty standards and whiteness, ethnic differences within the black community, socioeconomic class and assimilating into capitalism, and more. Without a doubt the best book I have read in 2019 thus far, Thick: And Other Essays is thick with wit, intelligence, and an assured self-awareness. McMillan Cottom has crafted a black woman’s cultural bible, as she mines for meaning in places many of us miss and reveals precisely how-when you’re in the thick of it-the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same. Yet Thick will also fill a void on those very shelves: a modern black American female voice waxing poetic on self and society, serving up a healthy portion of clever prose and southern aphorisms in a style uniquely her own.
This bold compendium, likely to find its place on shelves alongside Lindy West, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson, dissects everything from beauty to Obama to pumpkin spice lattes.
In the bestselling tradition of bell hooks and Roxane Gay, McMillan Cottom’s freshman collection illuminates a particular trait of her tribe: being thick. Tressie McMillan Cottom, the writer, professor, and acclaimed author of Lower Ed, now brilliantly shifts gears from running regression analyses on college data to unleashing another identity: a purveyor of wit, wisdom-and of course Black Twitter snark-about all that is right and much that is so very wrong about this thing we call society.
Smart, humorous, and strikingly original thoughts on race, beauty, money, and more-by one of today's most intrepid public intellectuals
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