A Good Country: My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America

An American Muslim confronts the horrors of white supremacy in this poignant if overwrought memoir. Ali-Khan, a public interest lawyer and daughter of Pakistani immigrants, recaps histories of racist oppression in places she has lived: colonial slavery and contemporary housing segregation in Pennsylvania, where she grew up in the 1970s; the Seminole Wars against runaway slaves in Florida, where she went to college; violence during school desegregation in Little Rock, where she worked in the 1990s with a community organizing network; and the dispossession and massacre of Native Americans in Arizona, South Dakota, and elsewhere. Ali-Khan’s explorations of these episodes are powerful and made deeply personal when she bears out the microaggressions she has weathered as an American Muslim, including people inquiring about her ethnicity and a gym teacher insisting that she run laps during Ramadan. Occasionally, though, the tallying of perceived threats—a Christian host thoughtlessly saying grace; Ali-Khan’s panic when pro-Trump signs sprouted in her Pennsylvania suburb in 2016—dilutes the potency of her indictments (“[America’s] historical and economic achievements are largely based on the violent extraction of labor from a racially defined slave or servant class, and on underpaid, marginalized immigrant workers”). Still, Ali-Khan’s look at the way the past bleeds into the present makes for an affecting portrait of a nation yet to come to terms with its checkered history. (July)