A few days ago, I read Grant Park, a novel by Leonard Pitts (reading some of it in a hotel room in Chicago across the street from Grant Park). The book was gripping, but when I finished, I didn't know what to say about it. I liked it, but it seemed a bit preachy. The story begins in 2008 when Malcom Toussaint, an African-American columnist for a fictional Chicago newspaper, sneaks into the paper an offensive column about how tired he is of trying to explain racism to white people—“tired of white folks bullsh--.” 

After Toussaint's late night sabotage of the newspaper's front page, he leaves the office only to be kidnapped by two crazy white supremacists. Since I couldn't find easy words to say how I felt about the book, I turned to Google. Vinson Cunningham of the New York Times says it nicely. “Pitts never manages to avoid didacticism” he says, but

Despite too many wince-worthy lines, the novel’s plot — jump-started by Toussaint’s unwilling inclusion in a white supremacist scheme to ruin Obama’s election night — is nicely wrought, and sometimes manages to surprise. Toussaint’s two-pronged story is placed contrapuntally against that of his white ­editor — fired as a scapegoat in the wake of The Column — whose life was also altered irrevocably by the ’68 strike. The resulting parallel lays bare the extent to which Americans, black and white, still struggle to articulate the basic elements of our shared past.

With these caveats, I recommend Grant Park.