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Books by Amiri Baraka
Tales of the Out &
the Gone
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The Essence of Reparations /
Somebody Blew Up
America & Other Poems
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Blues People
Autobiography
of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka /
Selected Poetry of
Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
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Black Music
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Why You Need to Send Some Money
to Ras Baraka
in Newark!
By
Amiri Baraka
Three years ago Newark, NJ.
lost most of its semblance of “Home Rule,” which
was a point of pride, though always flawed and shaky at
best.
The Booker Administration
raised our taxes 8% his first thirty days in
office and has since gotten rid of the highest ranking
Afro-American police
officers so that the top ten
Newark police officers
now are Non-Black, in a city still 60% Afro
American.
To emphasize this loss of self determination, both the
head of the Housing Authority and Superintendent of
Schools are Booker imports. The Housing Authority head
says he refuses to live in Newark and the
School Superintendent
moved from New York City where he had been living since
his appointment, he was formerly Superintendent in
Washington, DC but
somehow got the job here. Now he lives in a brand new
luxury apartment that is actually right across the
street from the Board of Education, yet he has a
chauffeured limousine pick him up each morning and
circle the block to take him to work.
To top it all off, not only has the Afro American fire
chief been removed, but now Booker is trying to sell the
city’s water. He is trying to sell the 38,000 acre
parcel of land Newark’s
water supply sits on to an unknown “Water Authority.”
Though Newark’s citizens stopped this outrage a couple
of months ago, Booker has simply submerged his plan,
submarine style, but we have no doubt it will re emerge
when he and his collaborators think the time is right.
There is much speculation across the city that with the
water sale Booker is trying to pay off the 6.5 million
dollar debt he owes to the elite groups that gave him
that much to buy the City of Newark in the last
election.
The most important way to stop this toxic governance at
the top is to have a city council that has the welfare
of Newark’s citizens as its main concern. Unfortunately
the majority of Newark’s city council are there for the
ride. Most came in with the Booker money and they let
the Mayor do pretty much what he wants to keep their
seats.
So it's up to the people to
rock this boat so a few of Booker’s Aides masquerading
as Councilpersons lose their seats.
The seat most needed to be
filled with an actual Councilperson rather than a Booker
“Aide” is in Newark’s most populous South Ward. From the
filthy streets to the intimidating murder rate, the
South’s present councilman is a no show. And after three
years it’s no secret. Walk through the south ask the
people, most don’t know him, those who do are likely to
use profanity.
But the problem is Booker’s Bucks! The people who sent
the present Mayor to get rid of Newark’s Home Rule and
squeeze super profits from its people are supplying
Booker with big bux (about 3 million now according to
Time Magazine) and he has publicly stated that he
will use this money to defeat the strongest challenger
to his South Ward aide. That strongest challenger the
whole city knows is RAS BARAKA.
Ras, who is currently Principal of Central High School,
one of the largest and newest in the city, succeeded
Donald Tucker as At Large Councilman but lost his seat
in 06 in the Booker debacle. He was also
Deputy Mayor under
Sharpe James, at no salary. Booker pays his
Deputy Mayors in
excess of $100,000 per, none of which are Newark people,
talking all the while about Budget Deficits.
Ras, the second son of activist-artists Amiri and Amina
Baraka, is eminently and obviously qualified. He was
Principal at Hawthorne Middle School, Assistant
Principal at Weequahic High and he is also a published
poet, his book Black Girls Learn Love Hard and a
CD with Lauren Hill,
Shorty for Mayor.
The municipal Election of May 2010 will be one of the
most important to the city’s future. Ras Baraka can
provide that “single spark” of Questions and Answers to
Newark’s loss of Home Rule and put us back on the path
of self determination for the city’s residents once
again.
$2500 is the most a single contributor can give, but any
amount will help. We are making this call across the
nation because our situation is that Wrong and we want
to begin to turn it around. You received this letter
because we felt that you would understand and moreover
that you would HELP!
You can contribute online at
www.rasbaraka2010.com
or you can send your check to:
Payable to
Friends of Ras Baraka
Friends of Ras Baraka
PO Box 912
Newark, New Jersey 07102
posted 15 December
2009
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Amiri Baraka—Dope
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Amiri Baraka: Money
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Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans. The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection.
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” |
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