Category Archives: African American
Love Twelve Miles Long by Glenda Armand, illustrated by Colin Bootman
Trust me on this one: Debut author Glenda Armand‘s Love Twelve Miles Long is THE perfect book to share today.
“This was a special night,” the story begins, “Mama had come to visit …” Mama and her young son Frederick are slaves, forced to live separate lives, their moments together precious and brief. Mama walks 12 long miles to visit her son, but “‘[t]he way I walk makes the journey shorter.’” Mile by mile, she tells Frederick about her sojourn toward reunion: “‘Every mile is special … Each mile is for something different.’”
The first mile is for forgetting … about the pain and exhaustion from her endless labors out in the fields. But the second mile begins her remembering: her inquisitive son, how happy he makes her, how proud she is of him. She remembers to listen to the night sounds around her, to look at the stars that light her way. She spends the sixth mile in prayer, “‘… that one day we will all be free.’” She sings, she dances, she gives thanks, she hopes, she dreams … and finally she reaches the twelfth mile which is devoted to love. And there at journey’s end is her beloved son … yet all too soon, she will hug and kiss him one last time as he falls asleep, just before she must slip out into the moonlit light, alone once more.
Rendered in rich, glowing watercolors by award-winning Carlos Bootman, Armand’s first-ever book is a true story, oh so gorgeously told. Mama’s name was Harriet Bailey; her son changed his last name to Douglass when he escaped from slavery. Just as Mama hoped and dreamed, Frederick Douglass grew up to “‘ … do big and important things.’”
Newbie she might be, Armand will certainly continue to ‘do big and important things’ with her writing. Back in 2006, Armand won Lee & Low Books‘ New Voices Award, and her winning Love just hit shelves last month. Let’s hope Love finds a home in every library, public and private. Surely this is one gift that will keep on giving for decades to come.
Readers: Children
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Biography, .Nonfiction, African American
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Without a doubt, this is Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie‘s best work to date. While her debut, Purple Hibiscus, was engrossing, and her short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, included stand-out gems, both titles pale to the exceptional Yellow Sun.
Gentle, innocent Ugwu enters the home of radical university professor Odenigbo as a houseboy, ready to learn (and eat!), eager to please. He is at first wary of but becomes quickly enthralled by his new master’s elegant lover, Olanna, the daughter of wealthy, prominent parents who have provided her every elite privilege, including a British university degree. Olanna comes to visit, and returns to stay; master, mistress, and servant eventually become four when Baby comes along, and meld into an impromptu family.
While the impassioned Olanna immerses herself in the intellectual life she shares with her “revolutionary lover,” her twin sister Kainene, a practical businesswoman, slowly builds a home with Richard, a British ex-pat wannabe writer more enthralled with his adopted country than his own roots. Inseparable when younger, Olanna and Kainene have become estranged in adulthood; their bond will be irrevocably damaged by personal betrayal, until unspeakable tragedies briefly reunite the sisters once more.
As the flawed, searching lives of Ugwu, Odenigbo and Olanna, Kainene and Richard intertwine, diverge, and overlap, their ethnic Igbo community declares independence from Nigeria and becomes the new nation of Biafra. The almost-three years of war between Biafra and Nigeria are marked by heinous acts of violence, forced migrations, deprivation and famine, brutal conscription to repopulate the depleted Biafran military, and tragedy to last generations to come.
Adichie, who was born to an Igbo family seven years after Biafra fell to Nigeria, clearly inherited her family’s experiences: she dedicates Half of a Yellow Sun (named for the demi-sunburst in the middle of the Biafran flag) to both her grandfathers who did not survive the war, and her two grandmothers who did. She adeptly alternates her chapters between “The Early Sixties” and “The Late Sixties,” as she purposefully distorts time, adding an additional layer of literary jarring to a horrifically tumultuous historic period. As the war claims millions of lives, no one is left untouched … not even the wide-eyed Ugwu who will find it nearly impossible to block out his own shocking crimes.
Immersing yourself in the almost-500 pages (or finishing nearly 19 hours of the audio version gloriously read by Robin Miles) is a surely a rewarding experience. But so effective is Adichie’s tightly controlled storytelling – terrifying yet never maudlin, inspiring but never sentimental – that turning the last page comes with a sense of bittersweet withdrawal, as if suddenly Baby’s chatter is silenced, Richard’s proud Igbo ramblings are finished, Ugwu’s wonder ceases, and Olanna’s searing pain will never ease …
Readers; Adult
Published: 2006 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, African, African American
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Following up two unforgettable novels that earned her a MacArthur Fellows Program “Genius” Award (which comes with a no-strings-attached $500,000 “stipend” over five years!) in 2008 was surely going to be hard work.
Last year, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie debuted her first short story collection … here’s the irony: given her spectacular personal literary history, to not compare these 12 short stories to her two novels (Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun), at least for me, proved impossible. And ultimately, Adichie is much more the accomplished novelist than she is a short story writer. Still, that’s not to say that these stories are inferior in any way; some, in fact, are haunting gems.
The collection opens with one of the 12′s best, “Cell One,” about a pampered young man who steals from his own parents, whose dissolute lifestyle eventually lands him in jail, his changing development observed and narrated by his knowing younger sister. Other standouts include “A Private Experience,” in which two very different women – one a young Isbo Christian medical student, the other an older Hausa Muslim mother – climb into a shop window desperately seeking refuge during a ethnically-motivated massacre, “Ghosts,” in which an elder professor meets a colleague who he thought was long dead, and ”Jumping Monkey Hill,” in which a young Nigerian woman writer participates in a writing workshop run by a renowned academic who embodies all the colonial entitlement and appropriation of the overprivileged white man.
Unlike in her novels, Adichie is no longer grounded in her native Nigeria in her short fiction. She examines and confronts stories of Nigerian locals at home, as well as Nigerians abroad, both established immigrants and recent arrivals. Most of Adichie’s peripatetic characters are women; many are overwhelmed by their dislocation: a wife and her children living in the U.S. while her husband philanders at home, a young wife via arrangement whose doctor-husband has surely misled her, a woman reunited with her husband who barely recognizes the gentle student she married, and a young woman who escapes the advances of her so-called “uncle” and eventually falls in love with a foreign stranger.
In spite of the undeniable strength of Adichie’s stories, her novels embody the greater power. With that earlier proof of assured achievement, her readers will undoubtedly anticipate more lauded work to come.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Short Stories, African, African American
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste
Decades ago, I went to college with one of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s grandsons. Beyond the seemingly ubiquitous images back then of Ethiopia’s barren natural disasters and widespread starvation, that worldly, quiet, thoughtful young man was my first real encounter with Ethiopia … at least the diaspora. Even then, I was instantly struck by the vast divide between those distant tragedies and the life of royal descendants, a memorable early lesson between the haves and the have-nots.
That divide looms large in Maaza Mengiste‘s searing debut novel that chronicles one family’s hellish experiences during the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia that ousted a 3,000-year-old monarchy, replacing it with the brutal Derg regime which destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives until its collapse in 1991.
At the family’s head is the good doctor Hailu, a prominent, proud man highly trained to alleviate pain, cure illness, save the dying. And yet he can do nothing more for his beloved wife who lies in a hospital bed, shriveled, exhausted, and ready to pass on, even as her family cannot let her go. Hailu’s elder son Yonas gravely tries to hold his family together, helpless when his young daughter becomes seriously ill and his wife Sara is crushed by the fear of potential loss.
Unlike the controlled, watchful Yonas, Hailu’s younger son Dawit is still idealistic, still fueled by a rash temper that once put a fellow student in the hospital when Dawit, too young to understand rape, knew a vicious wrong was being committed between student and family servant. Dawit is devoted to his dying mother, emotionally dependent on his sister-in-law Sara, in love with a headstrong young woman. He looks on in anguish and disgust as the new regime claims his childhood best friend, who uses complicity as a way to escape his deprived past spent in a mud shack adjacent to the luxury of Hailu’s two-story home.
The horrific revolution is about to shatter the Hailu family’s lives: the father’s humanity, the elder son’s responsibility, the younger son’s ideals will all be tested. As if working pieces of an intricate puzzle, Mengiste presents an epic historical moment too few of us know of, laying the most atrocious acts next to radiantly tender moments, next to utter cowardice and utmost bravery. The result proves unforgettable.
Tidbit: Make sure to check out the comprehensive 10×10 Book Club Kit for Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, African, African American
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
From the age of 16 when she took a biology class at a community college (making up for a failed high school freshman year because “she never showed up”), award-winning science writer Rebecca Skloot has seemingly spent the majority of her life preparing to write this book.
Along with mitosis and kinase inhibitors, Skloot first learned about the ubiquitous HeLa cells, “‘one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years,’” the professor told the class. HeLa was instrumental in developing the polio vaccine and furthering cancer research, while the drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease owe their origins to HeLa. Eventually, cloning, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping would also become possible because of HeLa, and five Nobel Prizes in the last 10 years alone would be awarded for HeLa-dependent research.
Back in that classroom, Skloot also learned that HeLa cells originated from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who had died at age 31 in 1951 from cervical cancer. Her cells proved “immortal,” living longer outside her body than within. The professor added, “almost as an afterthought,” that Lacks “was a black woman.” Then class was over.
“I sat thinking, That’s it? That’s all we get? There has to be more to the story.” As if in preparation to find out that “more,” Skloot went on to get her undergraduate degree in biology, then studied writing in graduate school. She spent 10 years tracking down Henrietta’s story, gaining unprecedented access to Henrietta’s children and extended family, many of whom still live in the Baltimore area where Henrietta’s immortal cells were originally extracted at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Skloot would develop a vital bond with Henrietta’s youngest child, daughter Deborah, who was only a year old when her mother passed away.
The result is spectacular. Part mystery, part memoir, part scientific adventure, part family saga, part tragedy (of epic Greek proportions), Skloot’s accomplishment can’t be overpraised. The less you know before you open the pages, the more intense your reading experience will be … so try not to dig further. Just know that you need to read this book.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Nonfiction, African American
Some Sing, Some Cry by Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza
Sometimes my inability to process dialects actually has an upside … because now I can just turn on the audible versions and be read to in my old age. So if you have the choice, I highly recommend the audible recording of Some.
Yes, at 26.5 hours (it’s 576 pages in print), we’re talking time-ly, but worth the commitment all the way through. While Robin Miles‘ performance consistently draws you in (she falters briefly when she sings – in spite of a gorgeous voice, her notes occasionally wander too far), the most important reason to listen comes at the very end when the authors Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza – who also happen to be sisters – speak about their 10-year journey to write the book. Shange, who created the seminal piece, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, spent half of that decade off, recuperating from two strokes which still linger in her speech. Listen to the interview as she vibrantly reveals how the legendary Maya Angelou helped get her reading and writing back …
Which leads to this epic saga, covering almost 200 years and seven generations of the extended Mayfield family. Music binds and divides the clan, with many of the characters embedded in the diverse music styles – spirituals, blues, jazz, rock ‘n roll, and everything in between – that provide quite the soundtrack for much of American history.
With the end of the Civil War, matriarch Ma Bette is thrown out of the only home she’s ever known, Sweet Tamarind, now sold to antebellum carpetbaggers. Ma Bette imparts a final goodbye to the late Julius Mayfield, her “Pa-lover” – her father, the father of her children, her former owner. With her granddaughter Eudora in tow, Ma Bette makes her way to the Charleston home of her daughter Blanche, who “[d]id so well for herself,” enjoying a privileged life among the city’s colored elite. Blanche is less-than-welcoming of her unrefined “Geechee”-island relatives, and Bette and Eudora are forced to make their own way in Lil Mexico, the city’s colored enclave.
Generation by generation, the Mayfield epic unravels, overlaps, separates, and dovetails again; Ma Bette with her seeing powers is never far, even in eventual death. Eudora, whose life begins with such diligent promise, suffers brutally. Of her two daughters, Elma the elder never learns her true origins, while Lizzie the younger tries desperately to escape her own violent memories. Their children eventually scatter, some fulfilled, others forever troubled. The music, however, always reunites them …
The dense novel is certainly ambitious … and if you listen, you will most likely finish. Besides, you must get to the final sisterly interview!
Admittedly, Some proves uneven in both story and style: Too many strong Mayfield women succumb to worthless men, too many repetitive tragedies desensitize the reader, too many impossible chance meetings happen, too much attention is given to musical history over Mayfield family history. Indeed, the pivotal decades from World War II into the 21st century are rushed through in the final 70 pages, diluted by too many distant characters. Ironically, the undeniable strength of the book’s first half made me long for a separate, second book to fill in the blanks, rather than feeling the ultimate disappointment of missing the post-war homecoming, the civil rights era, the anti-war movement, even the decadent disco years, with the latest Mayfields. I’m convinced … they still have their stories to tell …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, African American
JIMI: Sounds Like a Rainbow | A Story of the Young Jimi Hendrix by Gary Golio, illustrated by Javaka Steptoe
Growing up in Seattle, Washington, young Jimi Hendrix first made music on a one-string ukulele. He drew, he told funny stories, he hung out at the local record store with his friends “who never teased him about his worn-out clothes and wild hair … or … always moving from one part of town to another when Dad was out of work.” Instead, they “would chatter for hours about the latest rock ‘n’ roll songs.”
For Jimmy – as he was called then – “[w]ith every sound, a color glowed in Jimmy’s mind.” The music “set off fireworks in his mind.” He made music with a broom until his father bought him a cheap guitar and Jimmy taught himself to play: “He had a rainbow of sounds at his fingertips, and he wanted to paint the world with them.”
Drowned out in a local band, Jimmy moves up to an electric guitar –”the cheapest model, but to Jimmy … was pure gold”– hooks up to an amplifier, and “[w]ith a flick of a switch, Jimmy’s life was electrified.” He would take his “colors of sound” all over the world, “painting the world with his songs.”
For its intended audience of the youngest readers, the book ends there … a sanitized version of the life of a troubled superstar. But author Gary Golio does not gloss over the rest of Hendrix’s young life; he adds a “More about …” to flush out Hendrix’s biography, and then follows with an “Author’s Note” that directly addresses Hendrix’s death at 27 from “an unfortunate combination of prescription drugs and alcohol.” While mourning his untimely death – “we will never know just what he might have accomplished had his difficulties with alcohol and drugs been addressed and treated” – Golio adds a list of resources “for better understanding and addressing the dangers of substance abuse.” The message is clear … it’s never too early to talk to your kids!
Illustrator Javaka Steptoe, who captures the energetic, multiple layers of Jimi’s ‘electrified’ mind, gets the last word: “Jimi rocks.”
Readers: Children
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Biography, .Nonfiction, African American
Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson
Heads up for DC-area locals … mark your calendars: you can meet Jacqueline Woodson on November 9, 2010 at Fairfax County Government Center, Fairfax, Virginia! Click here for details! And now through October 31, 2010, a play version of Locomotion is up at the Kennedy Center (adapted by Woodson herself) … the run is just about over, so make your plans now!
Lonnie Collins Motion is Locomotion, named after the song his mother loved so much she had to bless him with it! He’s been forced to grow up far too early … four years ago at just 7 years old, he lost his parents in a tragic fire. After being shuffled through well-meaning church members and group homes, Lonnie and his younger sister Lili, 4 then, now 8, are forced to live separate lives, she with a new mother who puts her in pretty dresses, and he with loving but no-nonsense Miss Edna who’s already raised two older sons of her own.
Told in vibrant interlinked poems that pour out of Lonnie’s energetic young soul, Woodson creates a portrait of ‘an artist as a very young man’ in this 2003 National Book Award finalist for Young People’s Literature. From unpredictable Eric with his voice like an angel, the New Boy with a name everyone refuses to use, beautiful LaTenya with her missing extra fingers, Miss Edna’s son Rodney who comes home from ‘upstate’ to call Lonnie ‘Little Brother,’ and tenacious Ms. Marcus who wins Teacher of the Year with her patient nurturing, Woodson balances Lonnie’s struggles over his haunted past and his uncertain future, with his joys of new relationships and poetic accomplishments. Lonnie longs for the day when he and Lili might be reunited … but for now, summer camp is just three weeks away when they can be together always, even for a short while …
Locomotion is a memorable and accessible way to introduce young readers to various poetic forms, from haiku to epistle to free verse. As Lonnie discovers the power of writing, so, too, can readers join in on his unforgettable, brave journey of a sometimes uncertain, brand new life.
Reader: Middle Grade
Published: 2002 Continue reading
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, .Audio, .Poetry, African American
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
I admit that when one of my favorite friends told me she voluntarily gave up enjoying the blooming delights on a family trip through Death Valley in order to finish The Help, I picked up the book for a second time, determined to find out what soooo many readers were going on about. But again, I gave up.
Something made me try again. Having bought the book early on, I then bought the audible version, determined indeed to ‘read’ the bestseller. I must now admit … some books are just meant to be read aloud. This is definitely one of the best of them.
The narrating talents of Jenna Lamia, Bahni Turpin, Octavia Spencer, and Cassandra Campbell could not be better suited to bring this turbulent, heart-breaking, out-loud laughing, tears freely rolling story to life. To tell you too much would be a disservice … so bare details only are offered here.
In early 1960s Jackson, Miss., best friends Aibileen and Minny are two of the many African American women who have spent their lives serving privileged white employers, cleaning their dysfunctional homes, feeding their family, and raising their neglected children so that the women have plenty of time to gossip, play bridge, and – without even realizing the irony – raise money for the PSCA, the Poor Starving Children of Africa.
When Miss Skeeter Phelan returns home with her Ole Miss college degree, she is shocked to discover that her family’s longtime ‘help,’ Constantine – the beloved woman who raised her – has disappeared without a word. No one will tell her why or where Constantine has gone. Skeeter’s life as she knew it has vanished, and for the first time, she opens her eyes to the endless inequities around her. In spite of losing her lifetime friends, watching her mother wither, and letting go of the love of her life, she finds the strength and courage to tell the truth.
Race, class, gender … the hottest topics (even in this so-called post-racial brave new world) are all here, wrapped up in a story of mother/child love, the bonds of women’s friendship, the invisible dividing lines that some dare not cross while others will and must.
In the final pages, debut novelist Kathryn Stockett pays loving homage in “Too Little, Too Late” to the “family maid, Demetrie” who passed away when Stockett was 16, although not before she cuddled, nurtured, rocked, and loved young Kathryn through her childhood. Stockett rewrites “the one line that I truly prize” from her novel: “Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, we are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.”
Stockett examines her own relationship with her own beloved Demetrie: “I’m pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississippi, working for our white family… I’ve spent years imagining what her answer would be. And that is why I wrote this book.”
And that is why, three attempts later, I finally finished The Help filled with frustration, hope, sadness, eye-opening wonder and – with Aibileen’s rich voice ringing with her secret words to Baby Girl Mae Mobley: “You is kind, you is smart. You is important” – with pure gratitude.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, African American
Game Set Match Champion Arthur Ashe by Crystal Hubbard, illustrated by Kevin Belford
To better appreciate this biography of tennis legend Arthur Ashe – first-ever African American Grand Slam champion, #1 tennis champion in the world – read it backwards. That is, turn to the back and first read the “Author’s Note” on the last page.
Why? Because author Crystal Hubbard inserts her own touching, memorable story of the two short encounters she had with Ashe when she was 8, who remembered not only her name from a previous autograph signing, but the names of her sisters, as well: “Mr. Ashe, a man who had conquered a sport typically closed to people of color, who had walked with dignitaries and seen the world, remembered a little girl with pigtails, who didn’t like to play tennis.”
That is the caring, gracious spirit of the late Arthur Ashe, whom Hubbard captures with a fitting mixture of awe and familiarity in this new biography for younger readers. Growing up in segregated 1950s Richmond, Virginia, Ashe had to endure and overcome extraordinary challenges to just get court time.
His training took him far from home, eventually landing him at UCLA on scholarship, the first given to an African American tennis player. His tournaments took him all over the world … but Ashe never forgot how he had been nurtured and encouraged by many others to get to the top. As a champion, he “use[d] his fame as a tool to help other people,” especially in the struggle for equal rights, on and off the court.
Hubbard adds a thorough “Afterword,” which continues Ashe’s life story beyond his tennis career. She also includes a chronology of his short but accomplished life of just 49 years. Hubbard’s book is a gentle, inspiring reminder that championship is not about winning the grandest prize, but even more important are the choices you make in how you live your life that lead to true victory.
Readers: Children
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Biography, .Nonfiction, African American
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