Just Beneath the Soil

Author: Clint Smith

Paperback

Clint Smith, author of NYT Bestseller How the Word is Passed, continues his exploration of public memory.

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7th April 2025

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Paperback

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Summary

Clint Smith, author of NYT Bestseller How the Word is Passed, continues his exploration of public memory.

Description

Clint Smith continues his exploration of public memory and trains his expert eye on a new time period: World War II. With his poetic, effortless prose, he brings us along as he interrogates what it means to have a 'Western perspective' on the most consequential and brutal global event of the past century.

He spends time with one of the last Navajo Code Talkers, a survivor of the infamous boarding schools for Native children. He sits with the still-living Korean "comfort women" who were subjected to sexual slavery at the hands of the Japanese military. He remembers his great uncle, a Black American veteran who signed up to fight for a country that subjected him to racial terror. He asks, why do we lift Germany up as an exemplar of remembrance for their willingness to build memorials, monuments, and museums dedicated to the Holocaust? And should we?

As with everything he writes, accessibility to a broad audience and intellectual rigor are his goal. Clint puts it best: 'I wrote it for the 15-year-old version of myself. This book represents a new way of thinking about the greatest conflict of the past century, and provides new eyes through which we might collectively understand it.'

About the Author

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller and one of the New York Times Top Ten Books of 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent. The book won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.