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A review by shelfimprovement
Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City by Erica L. Green, Wes Moore
4.0
My husband commuted into Baltimore for work when the 2015 riots broke out. His office was not particularly close to the epicenter, but I do remember being very nervous about how easily things could spill out across the city. That being said, I wasn't aware of a lot of the finer details of the whole situation.
I think Five Days a very important book but I didn't love how it was structured, following several people over the course of the five days that Baltimore was on edge: a Black police officer, a city councilman, a woman in the public defender's office, the owner of the Orioles baseball team, the manager of a roller rink, and a woman who had been an activist since her own brother had been killed by a police officer several years before, and so on. I do think it's important to show the humanity of the people involved in the situation, and I think Moore did an excellent job with that. However, the chapters were often so short that I think it often weakened the overall narrative. I wanted to stay with each person a bit longer and really get to know them. By the time the book ended, I felt empathy for the people but I was a little disappointed that I didn't have more insight into some of the structural elements that created and escalated the situation.
That being said, I did read an ARC and the pub date was pushed back after the ARC was printed so it's entirely possible that things were finessed a bit for the final printing. And I do think this is a really important book to be reading alongside other antiracism books at this moment in time. I think there were many people who wondered if Freddie Gray might be the turning point...and then the nation sort of moved on. Five years later, we're at another moment that feels like it might be the turning point...and we need to remind ourselves not to move on this time.
I think Five Days a very important book but I didn't love how it was structured, following several people over the course of the five days that Baltimore was on edge: a Black police officer, a city councilman, a woman in the public defender's office, the owner of the Orioles baseball team, the manager of a roller rink, and a woman who had been an activist since her own brother had been killed by a police officer several years before, and so on. I do think it's important to show the humanity of the people involved in the situation, and I think Moore did an excellent job with that. However, the chapters were often so short that I think it often weakened the overall narrative. I wanted to stay with each person a bit longer and really get to know them. By the time the book ended, I felt empathy for the people but I was a little disappointed that I didn't have more insight into some of the structural elements that created and escalated the situation.
That being said, I did read an ARC and the pub date was pushed back after the ARC was printed so it's entirely possible that things were finessed a bit for the final printing. And I do think this is a really important book to be reading alongside other antiracism books at this moment in time. I think there were many people who wondered if Freddie Gray might be the turning point...and then the nation sort of moved on. Five years later, we're at another moment that feels like it might be the turning point...and we need to remind ourselves not to move on this time.