Saying His Name, Remembering His Life.

• Date: 01 June 2022
• Author: Gilmore, Brian
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Author: Gilmore, Brian

His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice is a healing book about a truly terrible moment.

Written by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, two sharp reporters from The Washington Post, this social biography of George Floyd is a masterwork. Floyd is not rendered as a caricature or perfect martyr; instead, he is flawed, ordinary, and special. He made a lot of mistakes and yet also tried to live a good life. And in the end he was, by his own definition, a success.

"For as long as he could remember, George Perry Floyd Jr. had wanted the world to know his name," says a passage early in the book, presaging his emergence as the face of the movement against police violence in the United States. This reminded me of the scene in Richard Wright's Native Son when Bigger Thomas tells his friends, "Sometimes...