"Passionately written...Dyson's larger purpose is to reflect on the relevance of the dynamic it represented -- speaking truth to power -- in the current racial and political climate. Singling out the cultural types represented in Baldwin's delegation -- artists, intellectuals and activists -- Dyson devotes individual chapters to how examples of each bear witness to black struggle today. When it comes to artists (and athletes), Dyson invokes a sometimes dizzying array of pop-culture stars and phenomena, from Jay-Z and Beyoncé, to LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick, to "Hamilton" and "Black Panther." --The Washington Post

[An] exploration of persistent questions about race that appear today, starting with a 1963 meeting between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and black activists, including James Baldwin. --Texarkana Gazette

Dyson's much-recommended work puts forth the artists and activists who continue to celebrate blackness, offering a welcome reminder of the power of art to maintain dialog with and within America. --Library Journal

"Dyson delivers a piercing and wide-ranging analysis of American race relations. ... a poignant take on still-festering racial tensions in the United States." --Publisher's Weekly

A moving ode to the potentiality of American social progress." --Booklist, starred review

"[A]n incisive look at the roles of politicians, artists, intellectuals, and activists in confronting racial injustice and effecting change. An eloquent response to an urgent--and still-unresolved--dilemma." --Kirkus Reviews

"Michael Eric Dyson has finally written the book I always wanted to read. I had the privilege of attending the meeting he has insightfully written about, and it's as if he were a fly on the wall. Not only does he capture the spirit and substance of our gathering, but he brilliantly teases out the implications of that historic encounter for us today. What Truth Sounds Like is a tour de force of intellectual history and cultural analysis, a poetically written work that calls on all of us to get back in that room and to resolve the racial crises we confronted more than fifty years ago." --Harry Belafonte

Dyson has produced a work of searing prose and seminal brilliance; a conversation that starts in a tony Manhattan apartment in 1963, where legendary black thinkers and performers confront race in the rawest terms with Bobby Kennedy, who stands in for a white America forced to lose its innocence and confront its demons. Dyson takes that once in a lifetime conversation between black excellence and pain and the white heroic narrative, and drives it right into the heart of our current politics and culture, leaving the reader reeling and reckoning. An essential book for anyone who cares about racial redemption in America. --Joy-Ann Reid, MSNBC anchor and author of Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide

"Dyson masterfully refracts our present racial conflagration through a subtle reading of one of the most consequential meetings about race to ever take place. In so doing, he reminds us that Black artists and intellectuals bear an awesome responsibility to speak truth to power. --Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

More praise for Michael Eric Dyson and Tears We Cannot Stop:

Anguish and hurt throb in every word of Michael Eric Dyson's Tears We Cannot Stop...It is eloquent, righteous, and inspired...Often lyrical, Tears is not...without indignation...brilliance and rectitude. --The Philadelphia Inquirer

Dyson...creates a sermon unlike any we've heard or read, and it's right on time...an unapologetically bold plea for America to own up to its inexplicable identity anxiety. --Essence

[Dyson's] narrative voice carries a deeper and more intimate authority, as it grows from his own experience as a black man in America -- from being beaten by his father to being profiled by the police to dealing with his brother's long-term incarceration...Dyson's raw honesty and self-revelation enables him to confront his white audience and reach out to them. --The Chicago Tribune

Be ready to pause nearly every other sentence, absorb what is said, and prepare for action. Tears We Cannot Stop is meant to change your thinking. --The Miami Times

[Tears We Cannot Stop] talks directly to you, about issues deep, disturbing, and urgently in need of being faced. --Philly.com

"One of the most frank and searing discussions on race ... a deeply serious, urgent book, which should take its place in the tradition of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and King's Why We Can't Wait. --The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

Impassioned. --Library Journal

Readers will find searing moments in Tears We Cannot Stop, when Dyson's words proves unforgettable...But more than education, Dyson wants a reckoning. --The Washington Post

"Dyson lays bare our conscience, then offers redemption through our potential change." --Booklist

If you read Michael Eric Dyson's New York Times op-ed piece Death in Black and White, then you know what a powerful work of cultural analysis his book, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America is going to be. At a time when everyone needs to speak more openly, honestly, and critically about the racial divisions that have been allowed to grow in the United States, Dyson's book -- available in January -- could not be a more welcome read. --Bustle

A hard-hitting sermon on the racial divide... The readership Dyson addresses may not fully be convinced, but it can hardly remain unmoved. --Kirkus Reviews (Starred)

Elegantly written, Tears We Cannot Stop is powerful in several areas: moving personal recollections; profound cultural analysis; and guidance for moral redemption. A work to relish. --Toni Morrison

Here's a sermon that's as fierce as it is lucid. It shook me up, but in a good way. This is how it works if you're black in America, this is what happens, and this is how it feels. If you're black, you'll feel a spark of recognition in every paragraph. If you're white, Dyson tells you what you need to know--what this white man needed to know, at least. This is a major achievement. I read it and said amen. --Stephen King

Michael Eric Dyson is alive to the fierce urgency of now and yet he's full of felicitous contradictions: an intellectual who won't talk down to anyone; a man of God who eschews piousness; a truth-teller who is not afraid of doubt or nuance; a fighter whose arguments, though always to the point, are never ad hominem. We can and should be thankful we have a writer like Michael Eric Dyson is our midst. --Dave Eggers, from the preface of Can You Hear Me Now?