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Cotton
Field of Dreams
By
Janis F. Kearney
Janis
F. Kearney, former publisher of the Arkansas State Press
Newspaper, board member of the National Newspaper Publishers
Association (NNPA) and personal diarist to President William
Jefferson Clinton, has written her first book, Cotton Field
of Dreams: a Memoir.
According to her Chicago-based independent
publishing house, Writing our World Press, January 1, 2005 is
the official publication date of the memoir. A special edition,
however, debuted in November, during the William J. Clinton
Library Inaugural Celebration held in Arkansas.
Cotton Field of Dreams chronicles
Kearney’s amazing journey from the southeast Arkansas Delta
where Civil Rights was a dream, cotton was king and education
was the carrot that stayed just out of reach for many blacks.
Her memoir paints a vivid picture of the roles of women,
children and families in the Arkansas delta, and the lessons the
Kearney children learned from wise, under-educated parents whose
greatest gift to their 17 children was a permission to dream.
Kearney was mentored by founding publisher of the
Arkansas State Press Newspaper, and Arkansas’ civil
rights legend Daisy Gatson Bates, of the 1957 Central High
Crisis. She is currently a visiting fellow and part-time faculty
at DePaul University, where she is completing her next book, an
oral historical biography on former President William Jefferson
Clinton. She has one son, Darryl, and resides in Chicago with
her husband, Bob Nash.
Cotton Field of Dreams speaks of the
black and white community’s amazement at the dirt poor
sharecroppers -- air of people with something; and, how these
parents with little to speak of, kept their children out of
school during harvest season, yet inspired in them a deep love
of learning, and an unwavering faith in a brighter tomorrow.
These teachings resulted in 16 Kearney children entering and
graduating from such colleges as Harvard Law school, Stanford
Law school, Yale Law school, Brown University and other fine
schools around the country. Two Kearney siblings served in the
Clinton Administration, and four served under Governor
Clinton’s administration.
Kearney’s memoir has garnered outstanding marks
by people like noted author and memoirist Marita Golden, who
wrote: “Janis Kearney writes straight from the heart. This is
a lovely celebration of her family’s strengths, journeys,
tests and triumphs. Cotton Field of Dreams is a book to
treasure, a book that will restore as well as reward.
International attorney, author and friend to
Presidents, Vernon Jordan says, Janis F. Kearney achieves
a rare feat in writing both poignantly and despairingly of that
period in American history most Southern writers either
sugar-coat or paint with wide, dark brushes of horror.
E. Lynn Harris, an Arkansas native and
prolific novelist, writes: “Janis F. Kearney’s Cotton
Field of Dreams is exquisite writing. Hers is a story that
touches the soul in its beauty and ugly truths about America’s
South.”
Roland Barksdale-Hall, Managing Editor
of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, says,
“well-written, Cotton Field of Dreams is a welcome
addition to libraries, seamlessly weaving lyrical prose and
poignant human drama to entice the reluctant and satisfy the
mature to read.”
For
more information regarding the book, go to www.writingourworldpress.com
For information
regarding the author’s book tour, or to inquire about scheduling an
event, contact Patrick Oliver at
wowpress@aol.com
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The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The Price of Civilization
Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity
By
Jeffrey D. Sachs
The Price of Civilization is a book
that is essential reading for every
American. In a forceful, impassioned, and
personal voice, he offers not only a searing
and incisive diagnosis of our country’s
economic ills but also an urgent call for
Americans to restore the virtues of
fairness, honesty, and foresight as the
foundations of national prosperity. Sachs
finds that both political parties—and many
leading economists—have missed the big
picture, offering shortsighted solutions
such as stimulus spending or tax cuts to
address complex economic problems that
require deeper solutions. Sachs argues that
we have profoundly underestimated
globalization’s long-term effects on our
country, which create deep and largely unmet
challenges with regard to jobs, incomes,
poverty, and the environment. America’s
single biggest economic failure, Sachs
argues, is its inability to come to grips
with the new global economic realities.
Sachs describes a political system that has
lost its ethical moorings, in which
ever-rising campaign contributions and
lobbying outlays overpower the voice of the
citizenry. . . . Sachs offers a plan to turn
the crisis around. He argues persuasively
that the problem is not America’s abiding
values, which remain generous and pragmatic,
but the ease with which political spin and
consumerism run circles around those values.
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* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
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update 3 May
2010
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