The Fire This Time

Editor: by Jesmyn Ward 
Contributor: Kima Jones, Garnette Cadogan, Claudia Rankine , Emily Raboteau, Mitchell S. Jackson, Natasha Trethewey, Daniel José Older, Edwidge Danticat , Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Wendy S. Walters, Isabel Wilkerson , Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Carol Anderson, Kevin Young, Kiese Laymon, Clint Smith

Genre: Non-Fiction

Original publication date: August 2016

Book description: A collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.

Thoughts:

This is hard to rate. This is very similar to a collection of short stories, you can't connect to all of them the same way. Some of the essays were emotive and touching, most mentioned situations I was not familiar with, not being from the country and having almost no interaction with social media like Twitter I missed most events. But still seeing there have been so many, so often, and worse still there surely has been plenty more that have not made it to the big media exposure these ones had.

IT is not a good feeling when you have to rate this, this is people sharing their own personal experiences, you can't rate a person's life. In this case, what we are trying to do is give an opinion of the writing. 

I think is a very good read, when you are able to see something people have been facing for years and yet no one acknowledges it, some insist that they do not realize others are going through such situations turning a blind eye or just makes up excuses to cover up the true nature of the behavior. 

Worth the time and effort to read it. Even if you are not living in the country or part of the ethnic group of the people sharing their life experience, it is always beneficial to get the perspective of people who have a different background than you. The only way to battle indifference and discrimination is by understanding others, in order to do that first you must know them. 

This book was not used in any of the reading challenges, but I did pick it up expecting to get a scare. I did get it. Not the scare that you get from a ghost story, but the reality check people are not always willing to get. Some countries are very scary places to live in, even now with so much racism and worse still, the fact that it is being ignored as such.

Scary reality to be in indeed.