We love getting new books from our speakers. Here are a bunch we’ve been sent in the last few weeks: Chuck Klosterman’s The Visible Man, Randall Kennedy’s The Persistence of the Color Line, Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows, Tina Rosenberg’s Join the Club, No god but God, from Reza Aslan, and Susan Cain’s Quiet.

From The New York Times:

Mr. Kennedy, who is African-American, has long been among the most incisive American commentators on race. His books, which include “Race, Crime, and the Law” (1997) and the best seller “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word” (2002), tend to arrive in full academic dress (his new one has footnotes and endnotes) and seem to be carved from intellectual granite, yet they have human scale. When it suits him, he can deploy references to Stevie Wonder and Kanye West as well as to Thurgood Marshall, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mahalia Jackson and Malcolm X. He has the full panoply of the black experience in America at his fingertips.

Mr. Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor, sets what we know of Mr. Obama’s presidency thus far in relief against the sorry history of racial politics in the United States. He worries, even in 2011, about “an inflated sense of accomplishment” in regard to racial progress. He points out that, in all of its history, America has elected only three black senators and two black governors. Mr. Kennedy examines recent racial flare-ups — over criticisms of America by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Obama’s former pastor; over Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation; over Mr. Obama’s remarks when the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested by a white police officer after forcing open his own front door — and declares, using what is, I think, his book’s sole exclamation point: “Race still matters!”

The New York Times reviews Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy’s new book, The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency.