Civil Wars discloses … Jordan's talents as a prose writer…. [It] is a seamless and eloquent personal retrospective, an intellectual and political autobiography…. [Its] backdrop is two decades of social change, with notable failures and triumphs.

From the Harlem riots of 1964 to the Miami riots of 1980, Jordan surveys a social and political landscape that is shattered by racial conflict and violence. But Civil Wars is not solely about the complexities of America's racial politics. Its real subject, relevant within or outside that American grain, is power: its abuse by those who have it, and the rebellion against that abuse by those who don't.

Jordan's characteristic stance is combative. She is exhilarated by a good fight, by taking on her antagonists against the odds….

Jordan's belief in words as holy and powerful enough to transform experience was planted in her mind as early as age 2, she says, when her mother...