Blessings and Disasters - by Alexis Okeowo (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From a New Yorker staff writer and PEN award winner, a blend of memoir, history, and reportage on one of the most complex and least understood states in America.

"In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster...."

Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery--the former seat of the Confederacy--as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Here, she weaves her family's story with Alabama's, defying stereotypes about her endlessly complex, often-pigeonholed home state. She immerses us in a landscape dominated today not by cotton fields but by Amazon warehouses, encountering high-powered Christian business leaders lobbying for tribal sovereignty and small-town women coming out against conservative politics. Okeowo shows how people can love their home while still acknowledging its sins.

In this perspective-shifting work that is both an intimate memoir and a journalistic triumph, Okeowo investigates her life, other Alabamians' lives, and the state's lesser-known histories to examine why Alabama has been the stage for the most extreme results of the American experiment.

Review Quotes

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The New Yorker, and Kirkus

"A multifaceted view of Alabama . . . Brilliant."
--NPR

"In this extraordinary book, Alexis Okeowo examines Alabama as only someone who grew up there could, with care, with criticism, with hope. Here, our much maligned state, the butt of the joke, the example of what not to do, looks much more like what I knew it to be growing up--complex, yes, but also, simply, just like every other state in a union that continues to grapple with its sordid past."
--Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing and Transcendent Kingdom

"I have never wished that a writer was from Mississippi as much as Blessings and Disasters made me wish Alexis Okeowo and I shared a home state. Instead, Alabama, you got one! The majestic ruptures Okeowo finds in Alabama will be written about for decades. Okeowo is showing out in this layered offering, and we are so lucky for it."
--Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

"Okeowo offers a wide-ranging and nuanced account of her home state. . . . Probing and sumptuously written, this makes for an entrancingly ground-level and empathetic view of Alabama's past and present."
--Publishers Weekly, *starred review*

"Outsiders like to define Alabama through oppositions--reality vs. myth, dire poverty vs. reckless wealth, violence vs. natural beauty, and Blacks vs. whites. Alexis Okeowo turns these oppositions into gripping complications, tracking the collective histories and individual lives of Creek Indians, Latinos, whites, African Americans, and West Africans, and combining a reporter's acuity with a storyteller's empathy."
--Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland and Constructing a Nervous System

"With a keen eye for detail and a thoughtful big-picture perspective, Okeowo paints a layered portrait of a state whose green fields contain more heartbreak and more hope than most people realize. Alabama is more than cotton, Confederate flags, and civil rights, and Okeowo's book is a nuanced look at a place she wrestles with and will always love."
--Shelf Awareness, *starred review*

"Timely and engrossing--Okeowo's exploration of 'outsiders' in Alabama sheds light on the divided face of our nation and lovingly charts the push and pull of the places we call home."
--Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, author of My Monticello

"A complex picture of a beautiful, colorful place stained by elements of its past, of course, but also its present . . . Okeowo rejects but does not ignore the stereotypes so familiar to anyone from Alabama, and Blessings and Disasters is all the richer for it. . . . Invites the reader to stare down the barrel while appreciating the bounty of a knotty place."
--BookPage

About the Author

Alexis Okeowo has reported on conflict, human rights, and culture across Africa, Mexico, Europe, and the American South for the New Yorker and other publications. Okeowo is the author of A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa, which received the 2018 PEN Open Book Award. Her work has also been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Travel Writing. Okeowo was named journalist of the year by the Newswomen's Club of New York in 2020 and received the Reed Environmental Writing Award in 2022.