Eloquent Rage

Audre Lorde's Black feminist tradition frames Brittney Cooper's memoir, which argues that anger is a source of energy that can give Black women the strength to keep fighting. Black women's anger, she says, has too often been caricatured as an ugly, destructive force that threatens civility and the social fabric of American democracy. Cooper finds that same eloquent rage behind Serena Williams's tennis, the pull of Beyoncé's girl power anthems and Michelle Obama's standing as an icon. She also tells how her life changed when she heard her grandmother's rage about love, sex and marriage in a front-porch confrontation, and describes a second intervention, staged by one of her friends.

Emma Watson chose it for her book club, Our Shared Shelf.