Quotes from Ron Charles

In the present day, we follow Peri on to the dinner party, where she arrives stained and disheveled but determined to dismiss everyone's concern. That's easy because the other guests are extraordinarily wealthy and wholly self-absorbed... I kept wanting more depth from Dr. Azur's presentations. Finally, I realized that's the point: He's a classic master teacher in the Dead Poets Society mode: iconoclastic but gimmicky, glazed with intellectuality but essentially narcissistic.

Coates has effectively taken back this tarnished history and clarified the position of blacks in the fight against slavery. They are not passive victims waiting to be saved by enlightened whites. They are warriors, strategists and spies plotting their escape and struggling to remember everything. {from Charles' review of The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates]