Grant Park: The Democratization of Presidential Elections, 1968-2008

(Paperback)

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"A novel as significant as it is engrossing." Booklist, starred review

Grant Park is a page-turning and provocative look at black and white relations in contemporary America, blending the absurd and the poignant in a powerfully well-crafted narrative that showcases Pitts's gift for telling emotionally wrenching stories.

Grant Park begins in 1968, with Martin Luther King's final days in Memphis. The story then moves to the eve of the 2008 election, and cuts between the two eras. Disillusioned columnist Malcolm Toussaint, fueled by yet another report of unarmed black men killed by police, hacks into his newspaper's server to post an incendiary column that had been rejected by his editors. Toussaint then disappears, and his longtime editor, Bob Carson, is summarily fired within hours of the column's publication.

While a furious Carson tries to find Toussaintwhile simultaneously dealing with the reappearance of a lost love from his days as a 60s activistToussaint is abducted by two white supremacists plotting to explode a bomb at Barack Obama's planned rally in Chicagos Grant Park. Toussaint and Carson are forced to remember the choices they made as young men, when both their lives were changed profoundly by their work in the civil rights movement.

Author Bio

Candice J. Nelson is an associate professor of government at American University in Washington, D.C., where she also serves as academic director of the Campaign Management Institute. Among her previous books are The Money Chase, written with David Magleby, as well as Campaign Warriors and Campaigns and Elections American Style, both of which she edited with James Thurber.