When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

Black Lives Matter cofounder Kahn-Cullors brings an earnest and heartfelt tone, if not always a consistent delivery style, to the audio production of her memoir. Over the course of the book she describes how her early experiences growing up in public housing in Los Angeles led to her political activism. She reads in a conversational manner that in no way belies the emotional weight of the hardships her family endured. The most memorable portions of the narrative are about her mentally ill older brother Monte, who was in and out of prison for years. Kahn-Cullors provides a more wistful tone in describing her immediate and extended families and their devotion to work and self-improvement in the midst of worsening economic and social conditions. In the second half of the book, the narrative addresses the motivations for and tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement. Kahn-Cullors’s pacing here is choppy and harder to follow. Still, the audiobook is well worth it for the first half in which listeners are privy to hearing Kahn-Cullors’s personal experiences as a black person in America read in her own voice. A St. Martin’s hardcover. (Jan.)