Николь Флитвуд выпустила мемуары о детстве в чернокожем районе Огайо 1970-х

Between the River and the Railroad Tracks: A Memoir Nicole R. Fleetwood. Little, Brown, $30 (320p) ISBN 978-0-316-56430-4 MacArthur fellow Fleetwood (Marking Time) delivers a brilliant account of growing up in a majority-Black Ohio neighborhood in the 1970s. With cinematic scope, Fleetwood chronicles her and her family’s attempts to “be birthed anew, to have vision enough” to escape the burdens of slavery and segregation in Hamilton, Ohio’s Second Ward. In her multigenerational home, Fleetwood learned early to tiptoe around her grandfather’s volatile moods. Her father’s violent outbursts, meanwhile, clued her into the ways Black men had been harmed by drugs, gun violence, incarceration, and the decimation of the Second Ward’s once-thriving steel and paper industries. As Fleetwood catalogs the forces bearing down on her community, she also details how her family found solace: her brother became a member of the funk group Zapp, playing on its hit song “More Bounce to the Ounce,” while Fleetwood herself escaped into books. Her academic streak took Fleetwood out of the Second Ward for college at Miami University and graduate school at Stanford. Here, though, she trains her keen powers of observation on the ways her home has shaped her. It’s a stirring self-portrait. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Nov.) Details Reviewed on: 08/28/2026 Genre: Nonfiction