Confessions of Matthew Strong

<b>An NPR Best Book of the Year <p/>A wildly original incendiary story about race redemption the dangerous imbalances that continue to destabilize society and speaking out for what's right.</b> <p/>One could argue the story begins the night Allegra Douglass is awarded Distinguished Chair in Philosophy at her top-tier university in New York--the same night her grandmother dies--or before that: the day Allie left Birmingham and never looked back. Or even before that: the day her mother disappeared. But for our purposes Allie's story begins at the end when she is finally ready to tell her version of what happened with a white supremacist named Matthew Strong.<br> From the beginning Allie had the clues: in a spate of possibly connected disappearances of other young Black women; in a series of recently restored plantation homes; in letters outlining an uprising; in maps of slave trade routes and old estates; in hidden caves and buried tunnels; and finally in a confessional that should never have existed. They just have to make a case strong enough for the FBI and police to listen. This is when Allie herself disappears.<br> Allie is a survivor. She survived the newly post-Jim Crow south she survived cancer and she will survive being stalked and kidnapped by Matthew Strong who seeks to ignite a revolution. The surprise in this doesn't lie in the question of <i>will</i> she be taken; it lies in <i>how</i> she and her community outsmart a tactical madman.