Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping
Written by Shane McCrae
Narrated by Shane McCrae
4/5
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About this audiobook
An unforgettable, “lyrical and poignant” (The Washington Post) memoir by an award-winning poet about being kidnapped from his Black father and raised by his white supremacist grandparents.
When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage—all the while believing they were doing what was best for him.
For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane’s grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. But despite elaborate fabrications and unreliable memories, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and to forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth, comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world.
A revelatory account of an American childhood that hauntingly echoes the larger story of race in our country, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is written with the virtuosity and heart of one of the finest poets writing today. A powerful reflection on what is broken in America—this is “an essential story for our times” (Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of White Girls).
Editor's Note
Award-winning author…
McCrae, an award-winning poet, National Book Award finalist (“In the Language of My Captor”), and 2019 Guggenheim fellow, delivers a memoir about identity erasure and reclamation. As a toddler, the author’s white grandparents kidnapped him from his Black father, instilling racist ideals into his young mind and alienating him from his heritage. McCrae’s memories unfold in poetic prose that highlights the emotional toll his experiences had on his coming-of-age.
Shane McCrae
Shane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry, including In the Language of My Captor, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award; Sometimes I Never Suffered, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and his most recent collection, The Many Hundreds of the Scent. McCrae is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
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Reviews for Pulling the Chariot of the Sun
9 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I highly recommend viewing the author’s interview and talk at Politics and Prose bookstore. It will provide a necessary context for reading this book which significantly plays with the memoir form. It is really a depiction of traumatic memory and not a straight forward memoir of events in the author’s life. Recommended for the right reader. Can’t really assign a star rating but Scrib’d forced me to assign one or the review would not be posted.
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