She's won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes and recently received the PEN/Borders Literary Service Award. A new collection of her nonfiction, What Moves at the Margin, is out now.
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For the first time in its 115 history the global fashion magazine Vogue features a Black man on its cover -- basketball Star Lebron James together with supermodel Gisele Bundchen. But critics liken the James-Bundchen cover photo selection to images of ‘King Kong’.
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(npr) A new generation of activists have used hip hop music and culture to get young people into politics. But author John McWhorter has a new book — All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America — which argues that hip hop provides hindrances, not help, to black America. (BBN Editor's Note: To hear the interview with John McWhorter, view source). . .  More...

Author Ananda Kiamsha Madelyn Leeke ’s debut novel, Love's Troubadours - Karma: Book One (www. lovestroubadours. com), pays tribute to the contributions made by Afro-Latinos to culture, history, music, and dance in the Americas. It features characters with Afro-Cuban, Afro-Mexican, and Afro-Peruvian roots. These characters offer rich dialogue peppered with references to Afro-Latino culture and history.  More...

(motherjones) If you haven't read Bliss Broyard's One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life-A Story of Race and Family Secrets, you must. No matter how well you thought you understood, this book makes you realize just how relentlessly integral race is to American life and just how crucial it is to move beyond it. A complex book on a complex issue, it's hard to know where to begin (good reviews here, here and here). Here's the easy part: One Drop is about having a semi-famous father who gave you all the insulated, WASPy pampering any white girl could want but who turns out, on his deathbed, to have in fact been black, then backtracking to figure out why and how he did so. And where that leaves you in a nation where boxes must be checked and sides must be taken.  More...

(nyt) 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.  More...

(bloomberg) Junot Diaz's ``The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao'' (Riverhead Books) won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, while Edwidge Danticat's ``Brother, I'm Dying'' (Knopf) won for autobiography. Joyce Carol Oates, who was nominated in both categories, won no prizes. It was a good night for the island of Hispaniola at the award ceremony in New York last night. Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the U. S.  More...

(afp) A book on Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's home life written by his widow will be published in Cuba in March 2008, Cuban publishing officials said Thursday. The book, titled "Evocations," was written by Aleida March, the 71 year-old widow of the iconic Argentine-born leftist revolutionary. "I feel satisfied, and when my final cycle (in life) approaches, I would like to say like Che said: 'think about me every so often,'" March said in excerpts from the book shown on a government-run website. "Evocations" includes in each chapter texts from unpublished letters that Che wrote to March, who currently heads the Center of Che Guevara Studies in Havana. March was Guevara's second wife, and mother of four of his children.  More...

"Superhead" returns with a new book highlighting more accounts of Hollywood bed hopping and tales of woe. On Jamie Foxx: He told her, "Damn, you're pretty!" when they met. "When Jamie Foxx offers to massage your body at four in the morning, after a bottle of Champagne and two shots of Patron, it's hard to say no," she writes. However, Jamie soon figured out she was "that Karrine. " Foxx ran in the other direction, leaving the author "depressed.  More...