On Books
The Book of Negroes: one woman’s unforgettable story is also a people’s history.jpg)
Posted by Words At Large Admin
on July 13 at 12:00 AM
Slaves, traders and pioneers: new book on the most turbulent period of Liverpool’s history
by David Charters,
Liverpool Daily Post
Jul 5 2008
'Never Been a Time' by Harper Barnes
By Scott Martelle,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 4, 2008
A look at the Illinois race riot in 1917, after black laborers came from the Deep South. It helped spark the civil rights movement.
It's not a black and white issue
Andrew Anthony
Sunday June 29, 2008
The Observer
Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate
by Kenan Malik
The two sides in the race debate have more in common than you'd think, says this vigorous study
A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music
George Lewis
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Reviewed by Jim Johnson
An Unflinching, 'Street' View of the American Dream
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
NPR
Twenty years ago, when I was a young professor about to teach a course on African-American fiction, I set about to find a forgotten or undiscovered classic by a female writer.
A League of Their Own
By KEVIN BAKER
Published: June 15, 2008
No more tragic or romantic institution emerged from the Jim Crow era of American life than the Negro League. African-Americans were banished from the majors in 1884, and a few seasons later from the minors as well, under a “gentleman’s agreement” between white owners and players. None would return until Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers some 60 years later.
Richard Wright: black first
A lively but neglected writer who showed what once faced a little black boy in a big white world
James Campbell
TimesOnline
By the time he sailed to France from New York in 1947, Richard Wright was a star, fixed in the literary firmament. Two of his books – Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) – had risen high in the US best-seller lists, and were being translated into European languages. In Paris, Wright was aggrandized by the reigning intelligentsia: he and his wife became friendly with Simone de Beauvoir (Ellen Wright would later act as Beauvoir’s agent), and to a lesser extent with the non-English-speaking Sartre and other members of the Temps Modernes circle. Boris Vian borrowed the grisly mechanism of Native Son – black boy kills white girl, then kills another girl – for his scandalous novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, which he published under the pen name “Vernon Sullivan”, who was allegedly a black American. The success of his books, and a shrewd property investment in Greenwich Village, had made Wright prosperous. A photograph of the early 1950s shows the family at the table in their well-appointed flat in rue Monsieur le Prince, being attended by a uniformed maid. Except for one brief visit during the making of a film of Native Son, in which the forty-one-year-old Wright took the role of his teenage anti-hero Bigger Thomas, he never returned to the United States. Wright was a true “black first”: a cosmopolitan writer and intellectual with popular appeal.
'The James Brown Reader,' edited by Nelson George and Alan Leeds
In search of the godfather of soul
By RJ Smith
LA Times
May 11, 2008
The James Brown Reader
50 Years of Writing About the Godfather of Soul
Edited by Nelson George and Alan Leeds
WHAT would the late James Brown make of Barack Obama? Most definitely, Brown would say he was down with the message of hope and would go on to say James Brown was the man who invented hope back when Obama was in short pants. He'd mock Obama's prim ways with a plateful of greasy American road food but be impressed with his discipline. The man who mentored Al Sharpton would have known how to box out Jeremiah Wright.
Biography review: Snapshots of Marcus Garvey
Bob Blaisdell
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Negro With a Hat
The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey
By Colin Grant
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was the Icarus of 20th century black political leadership. Arriving in Harlem from Jamaica in the late 1910s, with no capital but his eloquence and a big idea, Garvey inspired black America, flabbergasting NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois and filling the U.S. government with consternation. He claimed that membership in his Universal Negro Improvement Association was in the millions, and if it weren't for the chutzpah that fueled him but that he could not moderate, he could have avoided federal imprisonment (for funny business involving his shipping line). He was deported in 1927, and spent the last dozen years of his life in Kingston and London, unable to return to his base of power.
What Emancipation Didn’t Stop After All
By JANET MASLIN
Published: April 10, 2008
SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II
By Douglas A. Blackmon
In “Slavery by Another Name” Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of our schoolchildren’s most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War. Mr. Blackmon unearths shocking evidence that the practice persisted well into the 20th century. And he is not simply referring to the virtual bondage of black sharecroppers unable to extricate themselves economically from farming.
MLK Jr. confidant channels him in new book
By Charisse Jones, USA TODAY
Updated 4/4/2008
NEW YORK — Martin Luther King Jr. called Clarence Jones one of his winter soldiers — a loyalist even in the toughest times. It was Jones who helped draft the civil rights leader's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. It was Jones, King's personal attorney and one of his closest confidants, who smuggled out the minister's 1963 "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," in which he told fellow pastors why he thought civil disobedience was necessary. It was Jones whom King called on the afternoon of April 4, 1968, the day he would be assassinated.
Revered, reviled, then revered again
Colin Grant's Negro With a Hat tells the tempestuous life of influential black leader Marcus Garvey with chilling detail, says Andrew Anthony
Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa
by Colin Grant
Jonathan Cape
The Guardian
Marcus Garvey met Haile Selassie, the deposed Ethiopian leader, only once. It was at Waterloo station in London and Selassie snubbed him. Thereafter, Garvey dismissed Selassie as a 'feudal monarch who looks down upon his slaves and serfs with contempt'. It befits a life that was endowed with plenty of ironies that Garvey is now most revered by Rastafarians, the worshippers of Selassie.
African novel of the century
For 50 years Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart'' has been a literary cornerstone.
By Carlin Romano
Inquirer Book Critic
WASHINGTON - Over a simple dinner of chicken breast, potatoes and ginger ale in his Hotel Palomar room, the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe explains that he's not sure when his appearance on The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, from which he has just returned, will make it on the air.
Looking Past Race
John H. McWhorter
Too many blacks are obsessed with racism, says Larry Elder.
26 March 2008
Stupid Black Men: How to Play the Race Card—and Lose
by Larry Elder (St. Martin’s Press)
Larry Elder is the black conservative people love to hate in Los Angeles, where he hosts a top-rated radio show. He is actually more of a libertarian, but even so he voices the heresy that racism is no longer black people’s main problem. Presenting these and other forbidden views in his 2000 book, Ten Things You Can’t Say in America, he took his place on the list of traitorous black pundits.
Two freed slaves and the (early) American dream
A Dartmouth professor and her spouse track the surprising story of Lucy and Abijah Prince.
By Marjorie Kehe
from the March 25, 2008 edition
I fell in love with Lucy and Bijah from the moment I first heard of them," writes Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. There's nothing surprising about that. Readers will fall every bit as hard upon learning about the lives of Lucy and Abijah Prince. But readers have it easier. They won't need to embark on a seven-year odyssey to uncover the Princes' story. Gerzina has already done that for them.
Bending the birth of the blues
Researchers may just have found what they wished
Boston Globe
In Search of the Blues
By Marybeth Hamilton
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Alongside a railroad track in the Mississippi Delta, two signs commemorate the birth of the blues in the town of Tutwiler. While touring the Delta in 1903, a wooden panel indicates, W. C. Handy heard a musician sing as he pressed a knife along the strings of his guitar. Handy was mesmerized. The brass plaque on the other side of the track tells much the same story, but declares 1895 the birth date of this "native Negro ballad form."
New Book on Race and Economic Opportunity in America Resonates with Barack Obama Speech-"A More Perfect Union"
March 21, 2008 at 22:12:35
by Nandinee Kutty
http://www.opednews.com
New Book on Race and Economic Opportunity in America Resonates with Barack Obama Speech—“A More Perfect Union”A new book on race and economic opportunity, titled Segregation: The Rising Costs for America and edited by James Carr and Nandinee Kutty, was published last month by Routledge. This book resonates remarkably with the landmark speech that Senator Barack Obama made last Tuesday (March 18, 2008). Below are excerpts from the Barack Obama speech juxtaposed with excerpts from chapters in the book written by Nandinee Kutty and James Carr. The speech is in blue and the book in black print.
Crying Wolf
A law professor argues that it's dangerous to make unfounded claims of racism.
Reviewed by Daniel J. Sharfstein
Sunday, March 9, 2008; Page BW03
THE RACE CARD
How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse
By Richard Thompson Ford. Farrar Straus Giroux.
I've been accused of being a racist once in my life, shortly after a street vendor in Dakar, Senegal, asked the equivalent of $50 for a seashell glued onto a piece of maroon leather. I was 22 and no expert on African art, but this tchotchke did not look like a big-ticket item. When I declined in halting French, the man leaned close, looked me right in the eye and said, "Why do you hate black people?" After a slow second of guilty panic, I walked on, chalking up that exchange to the glory of capitalism. Given the sensitivities of young white Americans traveling through West Africa, the accusation was smart business.
Richard Wright's final book a bit of a thriller
David F. Smydra Jr.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
A Father's Law
By Richard Wright
Conjuring an unforgettable character can be a curse. Brontë couldn't improve upon Jane Eyre, Fitzgerald couldn't surpass Gatsby. A wholly original character can stultify an author's writing as effectively as it makes his career.
'Gentleman Jigger,' a novel by Richard Bruce Nugent A belatedly published roman a clef about the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance.
By Alice Randall, Special to The Los Angeles Timesbr /> February 24, 2008
Gentleman Jigger
A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance
Richard Bruce Nugent
Richard Bruce Nugent's novel "Gentleman Jigger" is a strange cocktail of glamour and dirt that goes down easy, quickly intoxicates and leaves a pungent taste. It may just give you a hangover. But anyone who has ever lamented that he or she was born too late to spend an evening at Georgia Douglas Johnson's legendary Washington, D.C., salon frequented by black writers, artists and politicians, or to spend any hour at 267 W. 136th St. "when Harlem was in vogue," should rush to risk the head pounding.
Book Review: Ralph Ellison - A Biography by Arnold Rampersad
Written by Kevin Eagan
Published February 21, 2008
Ralph Ellison began his life in Oklahoma in 1913, an area far removed from the cultural changes happening in America and an area that, despite its promise of a new life, still held blacks in the throes of Jim Crow racism. As a child, Ralph desired more from the America he grew to love and respect, and he would reach new heights through an unwavering love for the arts, especially jazz; he saw musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as heroes because they made it into the heart of American society, despite their skin color (later, in his novel Invisible Man, Ellison's unnamed narrator would also find solace in Armstrong's music).
A number of black-authored books getting released again
By Carole Goldberg | The Hartford Courant
February 10, 2008
Two voices of black literature in America are being heard once more. Richard Wright, whose Native Son and Black Boy are 20th century classics, and Richard Bruce Nugent, one of the founders of the Harlem Renaissance literary movement, are each represented by previously unpublished works.
Ten beloved books in black literature
By Rhonda Swan
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 08, 2008
There was a time when the term "African-American literature" referred to the work of literary giants such as Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston. Today, it includes Desperate Hoodwives by a pair who go by the pen names Meesha Mink and De'nesha Diamond.
Colorblind Conclusions on Racism
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: February 6, 2008
A black man stands on a street corner in Manhattan and waves for a taxi, and the driver speeds by. Is this racism? The actor Danny Glover thought so, and he took his case to the public and city regulators, resulting in a citywide crackdown on wary cabbies in the late 1990s. But what if he got it wrong?
Richard Wright's Unfinished Work Hits the Stands
NPR
January 8, 2008
The controversial and celebrated novelist Richard Wright died nearly five decades ago, and he left behind the unfinished novel, A Father's Law. It focuses on a black policeman and the son he suspects of murder.
The controversial and celebrated novelist Richard Wright died nearly five decades ago, and he left behind the unfinished novel, A Father's Law. It focuses on a black policeman and the son he suspects of murder.
Gandhi was anti-black, charges new biography
Indian leader praised Hitler, said whites should rule South Africa
WASHINGTON – When Indian-American actor Kal Penn announced his support for presidential candidate Barack Obama, he did so because the senator from Illinois inspired him like Mahatma Gandhi.
50 years later, 'Things Fall Apart' still required reading
Miami Herald
BY HILLEL ITALIE
Associated Press
At 77, author Chinua Achebe lives in grace and exile in a cottage built for him on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., lonely for his homeland and the people for whom his stories have been written.
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
By Douglas A. Blackmon
Douglas A. Blackmon's "Slavery By Another Name" details the rise and flourishing of African-American involuntary servitude long after its prohibition by the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution - particularly the 13th, banning slavery and involuntary servitude, and the 14th, guaranteeing the rights of citizenship and due process of law to all born or naturalized in the United States.
DEAR CHESTER, DEAR JOHN: Letters Between Chester Himes and John A. Williams
African American Life Series
Dear Chester, Dear John
Letters Between Chester Himes and John A. Williams
Compiled and Edited by John A. Williams and Lori Williams
Chester Himes and John A. Williams met in 1961, as Himes was on the cusp of transcontinental celebrity and Williams, sixteen years his junior, was just beginning his writing career. Both men would go on to receive international acclaim for their work, including Himes’s Harlem detective novels featuring Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson and Williams’s major novels The Man Who Cried I Am, Captain Blackman, and Clifford’s Blues. Dear Chester, Dear John is a landmark collection of correspondence between these two friends, presenting nearly three decades worth of letters about their lives and loves, their professional and personal challenges, and their reflections on society in the United States and abroad.
A look back at Charles Chesnutt and his pioneering African-American fiction
This week, the life and works of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), the first African-American novelist to be published on a national scale, will be honored with the 31st edition stamp in the US Postal Service’s Black Heritage series.
By Lucy Moore
Crossing the Color Line
Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 
Charting causes from the South to the Soviet Union
By Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Norton, 642 pp., illustrated, $39.95
Book Review by Michael Kenney
Boston Globe
January 08, 2007
Novel about slave blends true events and real power
Canadian author Lawrence Hill builds his historical novel around Aminata Diallo, a slave freed by the British.
Book Review By Julie Wittes Schlack
January 05, 2007
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Early Warriors in the Fight for Racial Equality
By DAVID J. GARROW
Published: January 04, 2008
Black-on-Black Thought Crime
Randall Kennedy has a gift for choosing topics: In four years he has covered perhaps the three most crucial issues in intelligent black discourse.
Review of: Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal
By JOHN McWHORTER
Special to the Sun
January 02, 2007
At 18, she's a published Harlequin author
The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938,'
Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett
Voices of black activists and their white supporters in the years leading up to and including the African American urban renaissance.
The Ann Arbor News
By Leah DuMouchel
December 28, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938,'
Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett
Voices of black activists and their white supporters in the years leading up to and including the African American urban renaissance.
Los Angeles Times
By Erin Aubry Kaplan
December 23, 2007
BOOK EXCERPT
'Condoleezza Rice: An American Life'
By Elisabeth Bumiller
December 22, 2007
Chapter 1: Twice as Good
Alabama, 1892-1962
The story of Condoleezza Rice begins at the close of the nineteenth century on a cotton plantation in southeastern Alabama, near the flourishing little town of Union Springs. The area was on the edge of Alabama's Black Belt, named for the rich soil and slave labor essential for cotton, the state's number one cash crop. By the early 1890s the slaves had been free for more than a generation, but so many remained as sharecroppers on the masters' plantations that planters still controlled the lifeblood of the land. New railroads that intersected in Union Springs had only made the planters richer, as their grand Victorian and Greek Revival homes attested. Now they could send their cotton to the markets in Montgomery in hours instead of the days it had taken by mule.
Africa: Equiano the African - Biography of a Self-Made Man
BOOK REVIEW-H-Net (East Lansing)
AllAfrica.com
Douglas B. Chambers
17 December 2007
Ways of Living
South Africa's professional mourner has moved to Ohio.
Reviewed by James A. Miller
Sunday, December 16, 2007
CION
By Zakes Mda
Race and the Presidential Race
The Wall Street Jourmal
By JASON L. RILEY
December 11, 2007
Ask a political strategist why Barack Obama is unlikely to become our next president and prepare to hear that he is too liberal. Or too inexperienced. Or too far behind Hillary Clinton in the national polls for the Democratic nomination.
BOOK REVIEW
'Condoleezza Rice: An American Life,' by Elisabeth Bumiller
Los Angeles Times
By Stanley Meisler, Special to The Times
December 11, 2007
The 10 Best Black Books of 2007
News Blaze
by Kam Williams
Singing in a Strange Land
By PAUL HARVEY
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
One of my favorite review projects over the last year was Nick Salvatore's Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America. I don't see this book discussed very much in the context of African American religious studies, so it's high time for a little plug for it on our blog!
Detroit's own Hair Wars gets coffee-table book treatment
The Detroit News
Ursula Watson
There are hairstylists who can whip up a 'do sure to turn heads, but in the Motor City, our hairstylists are known for creating coiffures that stop traffic.
Several times a year, at events called Hair Wars, which make a stop Jan. 20 at the Northfield Hilton in Troy, strong-necked models walking down a runway balance everything from luxury cars and motorcycles to birds, flowers and even barbecue grills on their heads -- all crafted from human and synthetic hair. Even the outfits worn by the models are often made from hair.
Mexican Immigrants Changing Views on Race?
NPR
December 18, 2007
In a country that long defined itself in black and white, this past decade marked a watershed moment.Latinos surpassed African Americans to become the largest ethnic group in America. Mexican immigration was just one driving force behind the change
A Scramble for Power and Treasure in South Africa
By janet Maslin
November 29, 2007
Thabo Mbek- Mystery man
The Economist
Nov 29th 2007
A Tale of Horror In Black and White
Washington Post
By Amy Alexander
November 13, 2007
August Wilson book set does considerable justice to his grand cycle
Pittsburgh Post-Gazet
By Christopher Rawson
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
America's Role in Haiti's Troubled History
NPR
October 29, 2007
In his new book, TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson details the 2004 U.S.-backed coup that ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He refutes the Bush administration's claim that Aristide willingly stepped aside, instead suggesting that the democratically elected leader was kidnapped.
Robinson's book is titled An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President.
Three Doctors Form Lasting 'Bond'
NPR
October 22, 2007
Years ago, three young men made a pact to transcend the challenges of growing up in the inner-city.
They decided to become doctors and became authors in the process.
The group has written their third book, titled The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect with Their Fathers.
Farai Chideya talks with Dr. Sampson Davis, Dr. George Jenkins and Dr. Rameck Hunt.
James Weldon Johnson's: The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man
Bits of Lit
Jason Hernould
By JOHN McWHORTER
Special to the Sun
October 20, 2007
Phillis Wheatley: A Restrained Voice Against Slavery
African American Literature: The Slave Narrative as a literary genre arose out of the necessity of the former enslaved individual to recount, publicly, their experiences as a chattel; not only, in an effort to present slavery as inherently evil but also as an impassioned denunciation of the superannuated religiosity of that society which was hypocritically supporting the institution of slavery and in effect evil.
Jason Hernould
October 20, 2007
Mosley's Detective Calls It Quits
NPR
October 17, 2007
Novelist Walter Mosley introduced readers to Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins almost two decades ago. Now he has published Blonde Faith, the tenth book in the Easy Rawlins series. He joins Farai Chideya to explain why he's ending the famous detective series.
Terry McMillan vs. Ghetto Lit
Amy Alexander
The Nation
October 15, 2007
Almost two years have passed since writer Nick Chiles published a New York Times op-ed piece headlined "Their Eyes Were Reading Smut
The Disillusioned African by Francis Nyamnjoh
Pambazuka News
Louise Cuming
October 10, 2007
Some time ago, in 1993, a forum of Anglophone Cameroon writers held under the auspices of the Goethe Institute of Yaounde produced, among many excellent articles, a reflection by Tatah H. Mbuy on "The Moral Responsibility of the Writer in a Pluralist Society
Criticizing Cosby
By Ellis Cose
Newsweek Web Exclusive
May 10, 2005
IN A NEW BOOK, A CULTURAL CRITIC TAKES THE COMIC TO TASK FOR HIS CONTROVERSIAL MESSAGE TO BLACK COMMUNITIES.
The Decline of African American Theology
Biblical Faith to Cultural Captivity
By Thabiti M. Anyabwile
Foreword by Mark A. Noll
Black and White Life
London Review of Books
Mark Greif
Ralph Ellison: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad
The Brown Bookshelf
The Brown Bookshelf is a group of 5 authors and illustrators, brought together for the collective goal of showcasing the best and brightest voices in African-American Children’s Literature, with a special emphasis on new authors and books that are “flying under the radar.”
