Some of “Refuge-e” reads like an over-earnest high school valedictory. But if the young autobiographer’s farewell to childhood falls short, it’s because he reaches so high.

Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” is a bracing study of contrast at a time when America has a president who compared anti-racists to the white nationalists, neo-Nazis and KKK members who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia a year ago.

The protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” is anguished, alienated and traumatized by a brutality into which society thrust him, then refused to acknowledge. After a psychiatrist in Montrose, Colorado made the connection for me, I was able to hear the words of Ellison’s fictional character coming from the mouths of very real military veterans: “All things were indeed awash in my mind. I longed for home.”

As Yaw, a historian character in Yaa Gyasi’s novel, tells his daughter "people need time in order to see things clearly."