(slaverybyanothername) In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—when a cynical new form of slavery was resurrected from the ashes of the Civil War and re-imposed on hundreds of thousands of African-Americans until the dawn of World War II.
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(BBN Editor’s Note: ‘Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,’ by Dee Brown, is a timeless historically documentation. The review below was written in 1971.
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Every now and then a memoir is published that makes us think, “Now that is someone I have known about and admired most of my life and yet I know nothing about their personal life. ” The talented, smart and beautiful Pamela Suzette "Pam" Grier is one of those elusive people and at 61-years-mature her first memoir, ‘Foxy: My Life in Three Acts’ (Springboard Press), has been published.
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Slamming into Gulf Coast communities on August 29, 2005, Katrina and the ensuing floods caused $81. 2 billion in property damage, killed 1,836 people, and permanently displaced hundreds of thousands more.
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Whoever said Love was a four-letter word has yet to speak to Mike Roy. In his freshman collection of poetic short stories, Mike Roy takes us on a tour through the most important chamber of the heart of love: the initial meeting, the first connection, the first sight of that wonderful but sometimes tragic and painful experience called love.
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(usat) Revealed in Marvel Comics' Ultimate Fallout Issue 4, out Wednesday, the new Spider-Man in the Ultimate universe is a half-black, half-Hispanic teen named Miles Morales. He takes over the gig held by Peter Parker, who was killed in Ultimate Spider-Man Issue 160 in June. In his first appearance, he simply breaks up a fight. But readers will learn the true origin of Morales and how he became the new Spider-Man when Ultimate Spider-Man relaunches in September with a new No. 1 issue.  More...

(wapo) The library is quiet. At the front counter, workers shuffle papers, sort books and peck at computers. A woman walks in. “Oh, Miss Shirley is here,” says the man behind the reference desk, peeking over the top of his reading glasses. He is a convicted murderer.  More...

(npr) President Barack Obama is the son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father who met at the University of Hawaii in 1960. The President last saw his father when he was 10, when Obama Sr. made a brief visit to Hawaii from Kenya, where he moved when the future President was just a toddler. But what was Barack Obama Sr. really like? Biographer Sally Jacobs takes an in-depth look at his life — and his legacy — in The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father.  More...

(nyt) For two decades, the Columbia University professor Manning Marable focused on the task he considered his life’s work: redefining the legacy of Malcolm X. Last fall he completed “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” a 594-page biography described by the few scholars who have seen it as full of new and startling information and insights. For two decades, the Columbia University professor Manning Marable focused on the task he considered his life’s work: redefining the legacy of Malcolm X. Last fall he completed “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” a 594-page biography described by the few scholars who have seen it as full of new and startling information and insights. .  More...

(By Kenneth W. Warren, The Chronicle) I'd like to make a claim that runs counter to much of literary scholarship. Historically speaking, the collective enterprise we call African-American or black literature is of recent vintage—in fact, it's just a little more than a century old. Further, it has already come to an end. And the latter is a fact we should neither regret nor lament.  More...

(Boston Review) The article was prompted by a recent issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science under the title, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty. ” In their introductory essay, the editors, Mario Luis Small, David J. Harding, and Michèle Lamont, strike a triumphant note: Culture is back on the poverty research agenda. Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors. Cohen begins with a similar refrain: For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.  More...

(nyt) When Henry Louis Gates Jr. told Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge police, “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” he was speaking truth to power, albeit in a manner more akin to arrogance than erudition. The big shock here, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson, is not that a Harvard professor misused the subjective case (“who” for “whom”) and inelegantly ended a sentence with a preposition; it is, rather, that Gates belongs to an elite enclave beyond the sergeant’s experience or imagination. Gates’s life as an academic superstar places him among a select group of black Americans aptly labeled “Transcendent” by Robinson.  More...

(SFBayview) Interview with the grandson of El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, formerly known as Malcolm X, about the missing chapters of the “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” and a new attempt by opportunists to tarnish the legacy of Malcolm X. . . . .  More...

(npr) The writer James Baldwin once made a scathing comment about his fellow Americans: "It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak. " As an openly gay, African-American writer living through the battle for civil rights, Baldwin had reason to be afraid — and yet, he wasn't. A television interviewer once asked Baldwin to describe the challenges he faced starting his career as "a black, impoverished homosexual," to which Baldwin laughed and replied: "I thought I'd hit the jackpot. " Several of Baldwin's essays, speeches and articles are collected in a new book called The Cross of Redemption. Randall Kenan, who edited the collection, talks to NPR's Steve Inskeep about Baldwin's complicated identity — and how his work challenged black and white readers alike.  More...

(npr) Writer Eugene Robinson grew up in a segregated world. His hometown of Orangeburg, S. C. , had a black side of town and a white side of town; a black high school and a white high school; and "two separate and unequal school systems," he tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. But things are different now.  More...

(nyt) Her feminist war cry of a play, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” is Ntozake Shange’s signature work, produced on Broadway in 1976 when she was in her 20s. Now 61, her speech and movements slowed by a series of minor strokes but her intensity undimmed, Ms. Shange is having another moment, or two, this fall. Out this week is her new novel, “Some Sing, Some Cry,” a nearly 600-page family saga written with her sister Ifa Bayeza. In early November, the long-awaited film adaptation of “For Colored Girls,” will bring that influential work to a new generation courtesy of a most unlikely director, the comedy and melodrama impresario Tyler Perry.  More...

(Washington Post) Kathryn Stockett's novel "The Help," published by a Penguin Books imprint, sold 1 million books within a year of publication. Her novel has gained accolades and awards, including the prestigious South African Boeke Prize. "The Help" is being adapted for the screen; at the helm of production is the Academy Award-winning director and producer Steven Spielberg. Sue Monk Kidd's best-selling novel "The Secret Life of Bees," also published by Penguin Books, is another story set in the South with African American characters. Kidd's novel garnered similar fame, fortune and recognition.  More...

(nyt) The 10th National Black Writers’ Conference begins on Thursday at Medgar Evers College in New York, an anniversary that prompted Walter Mosley to remember his first conference, in the 1980s. He was just one of many unpublished, struggling writers who showed up, he said. An editor had passed on his first novel, about the detective Easy Rawlins, with the rationale that the publishing house already had a black detective novel. “Terry McMillan said you have to sell books out of the trunk of your car,” Mr. Mosley said.  More...

(npr) In 1951, an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer. She was treated at Johns Hopkins University, where a doctor named George Gey snipped cells from her cervix without telling her. Gey discovered that Lacks' cells could not only be kept alive, but would also grow indefinitely. For the past 60 years Lacks' cells have been cultured and used in experiments ranging from determining the long-term effects of radiation to testing the live polio vaccine. Her cells were commercialized and have generated millions of dollars in profit for the medical researchers who patented her tissue.  More...

(nyt) “I will never be your clown,” Nina Simone shouted at a restless nightclub audience in Cannes in 1977. The mostly French-speaking crowd was either unable or unwilling to join her in a singalong, and she took it as a personal affront. “God gave me this gift — and I am a genius. I worked at my craft for six to 14 hours a day, I studied and learned through practice. I am not here just to entertain you.  More...

(slate) In Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, Lori Gottlieb argues that if a hypereducated, ambitious woman is still single after age 35, it's because she's too picky. According to Gottlieb, these aging go-getters are sans man because they have "unconscious husband-shopping" checklists a mile long. When they were younger, these women rejected men for having red hair or saying the word awesome too much. Now they are paying for their excessive youthful pride: Their marital prospects—and their eggs—have dried up.  More...

(npr) Like so many children of mixed marriages, the author Heidi Durrow has often felt like she's had to straddle two worlds. She is the daughter of a black serviceman and a white Danish mother. Her own personal search for identity inspired her debut novel, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky. The story revolves around a girl who moves across the country to live with her grandmother after surviving a family tragedy. The book has received breathless critical acclaim, and it was awarded the Bellwether Prize for fiction that addresses issues of social justice.  More...

(nyt) J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N. H. , where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years.  More...

(npr) A year ago this week, Barack Obama stood on the steps of the U. S. Capitol to take the presidential oath of office. That moment was described throughout the media as the climax of a journey that began 46 years earlier, at the other end of the National Mall, when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  More...

(wapo) Helena Andrews is 29, single, living in D. C. , and might be the star of a black "Sex and the City" -- stylish, beautiful and a writer desperately in search of love in the city. Andrews's life appears charmed: The film rights for her memoir, "Bitch Is the New Black," a satirical look at successful young black women living in Washington, were purchased before the book was finished. Shonda Rhimes, the executive producer of "Grey's Anatomy," is set to produce the film and Andrews will write the screenplay.  More...

(BBN Editors: This story is non-fiction and dates back to the 1990’s. In light of Wall Street’s hand in the current economic disaster, we believe this story of Joseph Jett is relevant. We pulled this interview from Salon. com. )….  More...

(wapo) The mixed-race son of a brilliant but troubled Kenyan academic and a white American woman writes an emotionally wrenching book about his search for identity and self. But this is not the familiar story of President Obama. It is the tale of his publicity-shy younger half brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, who has lived in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen for seven years and has just produced a loosely autobiographical work of fiction titled "Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East. " Speaking out publicly for the first time Wednesday, Ndesandjo made only a few references to his famous brother, saying: "We are family. I love my family, and we are in touch.  More...

(nyt) In 1969 Sarah E. Wright, a Maryland-born writer living in Manhattan, published her first novel, “This Child’s Gonna Live. ” Issued by Delacorte Press, it portrays the lives of an impoverished black woman and her family in a Maryland fishing village during the Depression. Often compared to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, the novel was unusual in its exploration of the black experience from a woman’s perspective, anticipating fiction by writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. “This Child’s Gonna Live” was hailed by critics around the country and named an outstanding book of 1969 by The New York Times.  More...

(Justine Larbalestier): In the last few weeks as people have started reading the US ARC of Liar they have also started asking why there is such a mismatch between how Micah describes herself and the cover image. Micah is black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short. As you can see that description does not match the US cover. Many people have been asking me how I feel about the US cover, why I allowed such a cover to appear on a book of mine, and why I haven’t been speaking out about it. .  More...

(publisherperspectives) The literary world is once again shining a spotlight on Africa. There are new prizes: the South Africa-based PEN Studzinski Literary Award for short stories, and the Penguin Prize for African Writing, a pan-African prize covering both fiction and non-fiction genres. There’s a new book series, the “Penguin African Writers Series,” which will include not only new books from emerging writers, but also classics taken over from the defunct Heinemann African Writers Series. And next year South Africa will be featured as the “Market Focus country” at the 2010 London Book Fair and African writing will be showcased at the Gothenburg Book Fair. The African ‘Greats’–Ngugi, Soyinka, Gordimer, Okot p’Bitek– have given way to a new roster of names — Chimamanda Adichie, Chris Abani, Helon Habila, Binyavanga Wainaina, Sefi Atta, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Chika Unigwe, Brian Chikwava — who have become the new faces of contemporary African writing.  More...

(ap/herald) The woman who prosecutors determined falsely accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape maintains in a new memoir that she was attacked, a claim that provoked an angry lawsuit threat from one player’s family. Crystal Mangum, who appeared publicly today for the first time since making the allegations more than two years ago, says in her book being made available online Friday that she is not "looking forward to opening old wounds" but that she had to defend herself. "Even as I try to move on with my life, I still find it necessary to take one more stand and fight," she writes in an excerpt of the book, "The Last Dance for Grace: The Crystal Mangum Story. " "I want to assert, without equivocation, that I was assaulted. Make of that what you will.  More...

(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...