“A compelling, profoundly unsettling blend of memoir and manifesto that proposes that―by design―matters will never improve for African Americans.... Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old.... An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.”
- Kirkus Reviews [starred review]
“[Wilderson’s] writing is powerful, nuanced, and lyrical (“Her hair was white and thin as dandelion puffs,” he recalls of a visit to his aged mother.)... [his] passionate account of racism’s malevolent influence is engrossing.”
- Publishers Weekly
“Profound, gripping, unsparing, and compassionate, High Risk offers a nuanced examination of issues that impact so many of us, from a perspective we almost never get to hear. This is an important book that shines a critical light on the medicine and systems surrounding pregnancy and birth.”
- Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, author of Nurture the Wow
“What a gift to find a voice like Dr. Karkowsky's in the literary conversation around birth. Her humility, introspection, self-examination, and expertise is precisely what we need from our most highly trained specialists.… A fascinating dispatch from the front lines of high-risk obstetrics.”
- Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
“Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism is a brilliant memoir and riveting work of creative non-fiction. He joins the ranks of Claudia Rankine, Saidiya Hartman and Frantz Fanon as one of the boldest and most unflinching theorists of the indispensability―like oxygen to lungs―of anti-Black violence and racism. And nothing since Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas has haunted me with the sheer terror of truth that Humanity and the world itself are defined by and feed on Black suffering and death. The greatest challenge in reading this Afropessimist coming-of-age story is seeing a reflection of yourself and finding the will and the words to prove him wrong.”
- Khalil Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America
“There are crucial books that you don’t agree with, but one still comes to understand the importance of the thought experiment. Afropessimism is one of those books.”
- Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric
“Dr. Karkowsky knows her subject from the inside, and shows us, both through her narratives and her wise reflections on them, just why such 'knowledge is powerful and painful and damaging, but it's also powerful and healing and wonderful.'… Every doctor, medical student, and prospective parent should read it.”
- Terrence Holt, author of Internal Medicine
“I am awed by this beautiful and compelling book Afropessimism and its ability to combine a growing up (Black) memoir with Frank Wilderson’s own unerring and poetic interpretation of critical race theory to inexorably install in all the ways that only great story telling can the pithy truth that without Anti Blackness there would be no America. Can you handle that. Can I?”
- Eileen Myles, poet and author of Chelsea Girls
“An edifying and utterly enthralling meditation on the joys and sorrows of being a doctor at the frontlines of high-risk pregnancies. Dr. Chavi Eve Karkowsky is a clinician who loves what she does, who grapples with tough decisions and who cares deeply about women’s reproductive health… This book should be mandatory reading for any woman who has been pregnant or considering pregnancy and everyone who provides health care to women.”
- Randi H. Epstein, author of Aroused
“Dr. Karkowsky unflinchingly probes the expectations, precedents, myths, realities, and curveballs of modern pregnancy and delivery. This book is a significant contribution to the discourse about women’s health and medicine today.”
- Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of When We Do Harm