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Books by Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works /
Black Boy /
Native Son /
Uncle Tom's Children /
12 Million Black Voices /
Richard Wright: Later Works
The Outsider /
Pagan
Spain /
Black Power /
White Man Listen! /
The Color Curtain /
Savage Holiday /
The Long Dream
Eight Men: Short Stories /
Haiku /
American Hunger /
Lawd Today! /
A Father’s Law
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Richard Wright was a brilliant writer
whose collection of short stories (novellas), Uncle Tom's
Children, won a $500-prize competition in 1938. Native
Son, the March 1940 selection of the Book-of-the-Month club,
was his first full-length novel.
In 1935, Wright got on the Federal
Writers' Project in Chicago. By the time he had sold poetry,
articles and some stories to little magazines, and was working
on his first,
Uncle Tom's Children.
He went to New York in 1937, lived from
hand to mouth for some months, then got on the Writers'
Project. he wrote the essay on Harlem in New York
Panorama. he also did some work on the Daily
Worker (he says he never got orders from Stalin to
cover anything) and became a contributing editor of the New
Masses.
His book of four long short stories, Uncle Tom's
Children, part of which had originally appeared in
in the New Caravan, was a success. The stories
won high critical praise; what one critic had to say of
them is characteristic: "Uncle Tom's Children has its
full share of violence and brutality; violent deaths
occur in three stories and the mob goes to work in all
four. more
* * * *
* Making the (Richard)
Wright Connection virtual seminar—“Autobiographical Elements
of Richard Wright’s Haiku”—led by Toru Kiuchi, Professor of
English at Nihon University, Japan—95.7 per cent of Wright’s
haiku carry a season word. It was easier for Wright to return to
his childhood memory of Mississippi, which was full of trees and
flowers, than to use images taken from Paris. Sick in bed in
Paris, Wright must have been trying to find a season word
without going out, recalling his childhood days in Mississippi,
which was “a whole world of emotion, of sounds and scents and
colours.” Composing haiku, Wright returned not only to his
childhood, but also to Chicago and New York days. Accordingly,
his haiku comprise quite a few autobiographical elements in
them. This lecture makes clear how Wright include his
autobiographical factors in the composition of his haiku.—Wright's-haiku
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*
Making the Wright Connection
An Online Community for
the Study of Richard Wright
The Wright Connection is an online community of scholars and
teachers of the works of Richard Wright (1908-1960), the author
of such major works as
Uncle Tom's Children,
Native Son, and
Black Boy. The community grows out of a fifteen-month
program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that
explored Richard Wright and his influence on the American idiom.
The program included a two-week summer institute held from July
11-24, 2010 at the University of Kansas, and subsequent virtual
seminars that used technology to foster collaboration among
participants.
The site serves as a
clearinghouse for all information about Richard Wright. We
welcome announcements of new books, articles, reviews, and
conferences, as well as discussions of new pedagogical
approaches to teaching Wright. We also serve as an archive of
past work on Wright, including the complete print run of the
Richard Wright Newsletter (1991-2006) and podcasts of
lectures by some of the world’s foremost scholars of Wright.
This site is administered
by the staff of the
Project on the History of Black Writing. If you are
interested in contributing materials to the site, you are asked
to contact us at
wrightconnection@ku.edu or at the following address: Project
on the History of Black Writing / Department of English / The
University of Kansas / 1445 Jayhawk Boulevard / Lawrence, KS
66045-7590
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* Table
* * * * *
Ralph Ellison on Wright and
Himes
I tried my
damnedest to influence Chester Himes, but I got
nowhere with him. After all, Chester preceded me as
a writer, you know. He goes way back. Chester and I
used to argue over technique and ideas, but I don’t
know to what extent I influenced him; but, certainly
Wright influenced me, although it was not in the
simplistic way that certain pseudo-critics would
insist. I’ve recorded in writing that I sought out
Wright the day after he arrived in New York. I was
still a musician, and it was at his suggestion that
I wrote my first review and attempted my first short
story. Obviously, he influenced me to begin writing.
What gets overlooked is the fact that I was a rather
well-read young trumpeter from Oklahoma who had
studied music for most of my life, including four
years of harmony in junior high and high school. I
had tried composing marches and popular songs and
had arranged spirituals, and I had majored in music
theory and trumpet at Tuskegee. My point is that I
had been concerned with art and its creation long
before I met Wright.
I was also a
bookworm who became interested in Wright because I
had discovered Eliot, Pound and Edwin Arlington
Robinson at Tuskegee. It’s interesting that no one
says that I was influenced by Langston Hughes, whose
work was taught in my grade school and whom I knew
longer than I did Wright. I don’t think that Wright
appreciated the background that I brought to his
discussion of creative writing because frequently he
seemed to assume that I was totally ignorant of the
works under discussion. But, I didn’t argue with
him. He possessed the certainty that came from
having an organized body of ideas, and he could
write—so having confidence in my own ability to
think, I listened to him and kept my disagreements
to myself.
People are
still arguing over what I’ve said or haven’t said
about Wright as though I have no right to disagree
with him. But, they forget that I wrote some of the
most appreciative criticism of him that’s ever been
published. Wright and I were friends, but I quit
showing him any of my fiction in 1940 after I was
unable to get his reaction to a novelette. Finally,
I pressed him for an opinion and he became very
emotional about it and said, “Well, this is my
stuff.” You might say that wish that he influenced
me not to be influenced by his style of
writing. . . . he was living on 140th
Street, across from City College; I was living on
Hamilton Terrace.
Chester Himes
mentioned the incident during a television
interview . . . with Nikki Giovanni . . . I find the
assumption that no Negro can do anything unless
another Negro had done so before him rather
simple-minded, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s an
inverted form of racism. An artist can’t do a damn
thing about his relatives, but he can sure as hell
choose his artistic ancestors. I had read Mark Twain
and Hemingway, among others, long before I even
heard of Wright. . . .
He [Himes]
might have seen part of it [a first draft of
Invisible Man], but I doubt if I showed him the
whole thing. I rewrote so continuously that one
draft blended into the other. But, Chester and I
were friends. My wife and I knew him and his first
wife, Jean, rather well, but I didn’t show my
manuscript around; the 1940 incident with Wright had
made me leery. I was close to Wright, but I quit
showing him my fiction because I had no desire to
offend him. I accepted the fact that our
sensibilities were different, as were our feelings
for style. But, I held no antagonism toward him.
Questions of
style and influence aside, we still had a broad
basis for a relationship. I admired and respected
him,. And we remained friendly. During the Fifties
whenever I was in Paris, I visited him, and whenever
he returned to New York, he got in touch with me.
Source: The Essential Ellison
(Interview)—Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe, Steve
Cannon. Ishmael Reed’s and Al Young’s Y’Bird •
Copyright © 1977, 1978 Y’Bird Magazine
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Black Power
A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos
By Richard Wright
Wright gives a detailed account of his six months
in West Africa, Ghana / "Gold Coast" circa
1953. The British still rule with an
imperial hand, but the seeds of revolution
are being sown. Wright meets Brits, common
tribal folk, tribal chiefs, local business
men, educated native elites, revolutionary
leaders, etc. The book is great because
Wright is thoroughly honest about his own
views and bias and this gives the book a
very objective feel. A very honest and
revealing book.—Douglass
Schmitt |
* * *
* *
I walked briskly and determinedly off, looking over
my shoulder and keeping in the line of my vision that
dance; I stared at the circling men and women until I
could see them no more. The women had been holding their
hands joined together above the heads of the men, and
the men, as though they had been playing London Bridge
Is Falling Down, were filing with slow dignity through
the handmade arches. The feet of the dancers had barely
lifted from the ground as they shuffled; their bodies
had made sharp angles as they moved and I had been
surprised to see that they were moving much quicker than
I had thought; they had given me the impression of
moving slowly, lazily, but, at that distance, there was
a kind of concentrated tension in their gyrations, yet
they were utterly relaxed. I had been looking backward
as I walked and then the young man pulled the wooden
gate shut and it was gone forever . . . I had understood
nothing. I was black and they were black, but my
blackness did not help me.
Excerpted from the book Black Power by
Richard Wright © 1954
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The Most Native of Sons: A Biography of
Richard Wright (1970)
By
John A. Williams
America's
disregard of Richard as an artist and a man,
plus his own interest in examining the
mechanics of the oppression of black people,
may have led him into his next venture—a
trip to Africa. For it all began in Africa;
the slave trade and slavery; lost roots,
forgotten heritages. Where better to
continue the study of what was happening to
Negroes than in Africa?
The idea was first suggested by Mrs.
George Padmore, who was a guest of the
Wrights. Her husband had remained behind in
London to work with Kwame Nkrumah, who was
going to ask for self-government for the
Gold Coast (later Ghana) that summer. In
fact, Mrs. Padmore's suggestion was
specific: go to the Gold Coast.
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The postwar years had seen a ferment for freedom around
the world in the colonies of Britain, France, The
Netherlands, and Belgium. "What about the Four
Freedoms?" the people in the colonies wanted to know.
Keeping pace with the cresting desire for independence,
the Fifth Pan-African Congress had been held in
Manchester, England, only the year before.
Wright's Ghana in the 1950s
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* *
Wright's biographer
John A. Williams wrote in
The Most Native of Sons, a Biography of
Richard Wright: "The life of a small black
boy in a small country town in the Deep South could
be very peaceful, as it sometimes was for Richard.
Under the bright, hot summer sun, he fished with his
father and his brother, walked slowly along the
dusty roads, or played in the fields. Though the
wounds of segregation in the Deep South and
throughout the country always followed him, Wright
said, 'I know America. I know what a great nation
and people America could be but won't be until there
is only one American, regardless of his color or his
religion or anything else'."
Southern Literary Trail
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* *
An American Goes Back to Africa: Richard Wright’s
Journey of Discovery
(Rudolph Lewis)
* * *
* *
Richard Wright Papers
JWJ MSS 3 /
Processed by Timothy G. Young
Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library
New Haven, Connecticut
April 1994
Last Updated: October 2006
Provenance
The Wright Papers were purchased in 1976 from Mrs. Ellen
Wright, Richard Wright's widow.
Richard Wright 1908-1960
Richard Nathaniel Wright was born
September 4, 1908 near Natchez, Mississippi, to Ella
Wilson Wright, a schoolteacher, and Nathan Wright, a
sharecropper. The story of Richard Wright's childhood,
with its harrowing episodes of abandonment by his
father, his temporary consignment to an orphanage after
his mother became ill, and his short-lived schooling
under the harsh guardianship of his grandmother have
been detailed in his autobiography,
Black Boy (published in 1945 by Harper &
Row).
Wright's break with his past began
in 1927, when he left the South for the more hopeful
environs of Chicago. There, he worked at a number of
different jobs, continued to educate himself by reading
and began to write. During the early years of the
Depression, Wright found himself attracted to local
Communist groups, eventually joining the Chicago John
Reed Club. His entrance into this exciting political
milieu was matched by an increasingly prolific output of
writing. He published poetry in left-wing journals such
as
New Masses and The
Anvil, and began working on early versions of
Lawd Today!
and
Tarbaby's
Dawn. In 1935, he was employed by the Illinois
Federal Writers Project, which further strengthened
his hopes of being a published author.
Wright moved to New York in 1937
to act as the head of the Harlem Bureau of the
Daily Worker. His first major break came the
following year, when he submitted four long stories for
a contest sponsored by
Story magazine and won a publishing contract.
The collection, published as
Uncle Tom's Children, garnered sympathetic reviews and
secured Wright an agent and a hopeful future as a
novelist.
The work Wright proposed next was
to be a deeply realistic account of oppression and black
rage. With the assistance of a Fellowship from the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Wright
spent much of 1939 writing
Native Son. Harper & Row published the novel
on March 1, 1940. The resulting sales and critical
acclaim for the book placed Wright in the position as
the most well-known black author in America. In January,
1941, he was awarded the
Spingarn Medal by the NAACP.
Though Wright was constantly
working on several different novels intended to follow
Native Son, he switched the focus of his
creative endeavors to different forms of writing. Late
in 1940, he began a stage adaptation of
Native Son in collaboration with Paul Green.
The production debuted in early 1941 on Broadway in a
production staged by Orson Welles. The summer of that
year saw the publication of a collection of photographs
of black Americans,
12 Million Black Voices, accompanied by a discursive
essay by Wright, and a collaboration with
Count
Basie on a jazz song, "Joe
Louis Blues" ["King Joe"
King Joe, Part 1
/
King Joe, Part 2
].
In March 1941, Wright married
Ellen Poplar. (A brief marriage to Rose Dhima Meadman
had ended in divorce in 1938). Richard and Ellen Wright
would have two children, Julia, in 1942, and Rachael in
1949.
Between 1943-45, while Wright
tried his hand at other fields of the arts, such as
screenwriting, he concentrated on writing his
autobiography. The finished draft, known as "American Hunger," was cut in half by the time it
was ready for publication. The resulting work,
Black Boy, thus details Wright's life only
from the time he was born to the point of his departure
from the South in 1927. Though sections of the
suppressed later sections of the book appeared in print
in various places in subsequent years, the original work
was only completely "published" posthumously with the
appearance of
American Hunger in 1977.
In 1946, at the invitation of the
French Government, Wright visited France for a period of
six months. He returned the following year with his
family to live and remained there until his death. The
translation of his books and stories into French
clinched his growing popularity in that country. While
at work on a second novel, Wright took time off between
1949-51 to work on the film version of Native Son.
Having found a partner in the French director Pierre
Chenal, Wright adapted his most well-known work to this
medium and prepared to play the role of Bigger Thomas,
himself. The movie, shot in Argentina and alternately
titled
Sangre Negra, debuted in America in 1951 to less
than enthusiastic reviews and even a legal action which
successfully banned its projection in several states.
In 1953, Wright reaffirmed his
stature as a novelist by publishing,
The Outsider, on which he had been working
since the publication of
Black Boy. This was followed a year later
by a shorter work,
Savage Holiday. For the rest of the decade,
Wright concentrated on reportorial writing. He describes
his 1953 trip to the Gold Coast of Africa in
Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of
Pathos. His attendance at the Bandung Conference
in Indonesia in 1955 is the subject of
The Color Curtain. His commentary and analysis of
the culture of Spain was published in 1956 as
Pagan Spain.
White Man Listen!
, which appeared in 1957, brought
together four essays and lectures, on which Wright had
been working for many years.
Wright returned once again to the
novel form in 1958, publishing
The Long Dream, a work that was quickly adapted
by Ketti Frings for the stage. It debuted on Broadway in
1959 and ran for five performances. Wright's own
adaptation of Louis Sapin's "Papa, Bon Dieu" (as "Daddy
Goodness") also suffered a short life, its production
abandoned in the Spring of 1959 (before finally being
staged in New York in 1968). In 1959, Wright pursued the
possibility of moving his family to England, but faced
ultimate rejection from the immigration authorities.
This, coupled with failing health, slowed his
preparation of a collection of short stories. In late
November, 1960, Wright was admitted to a clinic in Paris
to undergo medical examinations. While resting at the
clinic, he died of a heart attack on November 28, 1960,
at the age of 52.
Library Beinecke
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Uncle Tom's Children
By
Richard Wright
Originally published in 1938 by Harper
and Brothers as Uncle Tom's Children:
Four Novellas, the volume consisted of
"Big Boy Leaves Home," "Down by the
Riverside," "Long Black Song," and "Fire
and Cloud." In 1940, Harper reissued the
volume as Uncle Tom's Children: Five
Long Stories, incorporating "Bright and
Morning Star" as well as placing "The
Ethics of Living Jim Crow" as the text's
introduction.
Reviewing the text for the
Saturday Review of Literature (2
April 1938), Zora Neale Hurston wrote
"This is a book about hatreds. Mr.
Wright serves notice by his title that
he speaks of a people in revolt, and his
stories are so grim that the Dismal
Swamp of race hatred must be where they
live. Not one act of understanding and
sympathy comes to pass in the entire
work"1. |
Reviewing the
text for the
Partisan Review (May 1938), James T. Farrell
wrote "Especially remarkable is the handling of
dialogue. Richard Wright uses simple speech as a
means of carrying on his narrative, as a medium for
poetic and lyrical effects, and as an instrument of
characterization. Through the dialect of his people
he is able to generalize their feelings about life,
their fate, the social situation in which they live
and suffer and are oppressed. Here is a
demonstration—which
many writers might study—of
the possibilities of the vernacular."2.
Hurston wasn't
so excited about Wright's dialogue, criticizing
Wright's use of dialect: "Since the author is
himself a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling thing.
One wonders how he arrived at it. Certainly he does
not write by ear unless he is tone-deaf."3
"Big Boy
Leaves Home" presents a child whose innocence is
lost violently through a confrontation with the son
of a white landowner. While Big Boy is aware of the
racist society in which he lives, his reactions are
more instinctive than reflective. In "Down by the
Riverside," the protagonist Mann finds himself drawn
into confrontations with the white community through
circumstances beyond his control: first the flood,
then the need to transport his wife, who is in labor,
towards town in a boat stolen from a white man.
Mann's responses to these circumstances suggest his
resignation to fate, although he does consider and
reject alternatives that would possibly save him.
With "Long
Black Song," the characters begin to identify
the systemic nature of racist oppression. Silas, who
owns his own land but whose wife Sarah has been
unfaithful with a white travelling salesman,
confronts and kills the salesman, then calmly awaits
the white mob. As Sarah looks on, Silas announces,
"The white folks ain never gimme a chance! They ain
never give no black man a chance! There ain nothin
in yo whole life yuh kin keep from em! They take yo
lan! They take yo freedom! They take yo women! N
then they take yo life!" 4
In "Fire and
Cloud" and "Bright and Morning Star,"
Wright turns to an examination of the economic uses
of racism, particularly the way in which skin color
divides the working class and reinforces the
capitalist power structure. In "Fire and Cloud,"
Reverend Taylor's realization that his leadership
position in the Black community doesn't shield him
from racist violence and in fact depends a good deal
on his leading his people toward decisions that
benefit the status quo leads him to reject the
mayor's demand that he tell his hungry congregation
not to participate in a communist led march. He
tells his congregation, "All the time they wuz hepin
me, all the time they been givin me favors, they wuz
doin it sos they could tell me t tell yuh how t ack!"
5
Taylor sides
with the communists' cause, although he doesn't
identify with the communists themselves. As his
revelation comes to him, Taylor exclaims to his son,
"Gawds wid the people! N the peoples gotta be real
as Gawd t us! We cant hep ourselves er the people
when wes erlone...All the will, all the strength,
all the power, all the numbahs is in the people!"
6
In "Bright
and Morning Star," Wright continues an
examination of the competing roles of religion and
communism in his characters and their community.
Johnny-Boy's mother Sue must come to grips with a
new vision: "The wrongs and sufferings of black men
had taken the place of Him nailed to the Cross; the
meager beginnings of the party had become another
resurrection."7 As in the other stories,
Sue is finally forced to act through the physical
violence visited upon her by the white community. In
shooting the stoolpigeon Booker, Sue knows she has
given up her own life. Her final sacrifice is not
only a defense of her son, but also a defense of the
Communist Party, for whom Johnny-Boy works as an
organizer.
Wright's
treatment of communism in the African American
community in these stories is hardly simplistic.
Taylor's understanding that his people's interests
and the communists' goals are in tandem arises
through his experiences in the food crisis. However,
the text also allows Taylor to remain ambiguously
independent of the Communist Party. Likewise in
"Bright and Morning Star," the racial solidarity
suggested or promised by communism is shown to be
easily undermined through infiltration. In other
words, although Johnny-Boy rejects the racial
paradigm in favor of an economic analysis ("Ah cant
see white n Ah cant see black. . . Ah sees rich men
n Ah sees po men."8), he still must
function in a community that hasn't thoroughly
rejected it.
1] Appiah, K.A.,
and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds.
Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and
Present (New York: Amistad, 1993), 3.
[2] Appiah 5.
[3] Appiah 4.
[4] Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom's Children
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 152.
[5] Wright, 217.
[6] Wright, 210.
[7] Wright, 225.
[8] Wright, 234.
Source:
GWU
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*
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Native Son (1951) (B&W Ep) [VHS] (1949)
Richard Wright (Actor), Gloria Madison
(Actor), Pierre Chenal
When originally released in Europe as
Sangre Negra in 1950,
Native Son—the film—was a long time
coming for Wright. The author had fought for
the integrity of his original novel enough
to take up playing Bigger Thomas himself.
When released for American audiences as much
as 30 minutes of film was left on the
editing room floor. It would be interesting
to know what was left out, but one can make
an educated guess.
For those of you who have read the
novel this may not seem odd, but the main
parts left out of the film have to do with
miscegenation (Bigger kissing Ms Dalton) and
Communism (the word isn't even mentioned!!).
What is left is a dry husk of novel, but it
leaves one to wonder what American audiences
(or rather the censors) were ready to show
in American theatres.
Several liberties were taken by the
director (and Wright?) that may also prove
interesting for further conversation.
Bessie, Bigger's one-dimensional love
interest, is killed in the movie also, but
it comes to the reader/viewer in the form of
a flashback in the prison scene (Fate).
|
Also, there is an interesting dream
sequence where Bessie comes to Bigger like a Judas
figure and Bigger runs through the cotton fields of his
dream to his waiting father. . .
It's refreshing to see his father appear in the dream
sequence considering that it's NOT in the book and
Wright's father had left him at an early age.
Wright may have been an excellent
though 'confused' writer, but he is NO actor!! I just
imagined Bigger to be a little more thuggish than Wright
could pull-off. But he should get an E for Effort:
Losing 50 pounds to play the role, fighting to get the
film made in Europe since he had Communism affiliations
during the Macarthy trials, and just being an all around
'Daemonic Genius.' I'd recommend the film for its
extra-literary qualities. If your teaching the novel,
give your self a 90-minute break!!
But the Book is Better than the Film!!!
T.A. Stewart
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The State of African Education
(April 200)
Attack On Africans Writing Their Own
History Part 1 of 7
Dr Asa Hilliard III speaks on the assault of academia on
Africans writing and accounting for their own history.
Dr Hilliard is A
teacher, psychologist, and historian.
Part 2 of 7
/
Part
3 of 7 /
Part 4 of 7
/
Part 5 of 7 /
Part 6 of 7 /
Part 7 of 7
John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk
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AALBC.com's 25 Best Selling Books
For July 1st through August
31st 2011
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#2 -
Flyy Girl by Omar Tyree
#3 -
Head Bangers: An APF Sexcapade by Zane
#4 -
Life Is Short But Wide by J. California Cooper
#5 -
Stackin' Paper 2 Genesis' Payback by Joy King
#6 -
Thug Lovin' (Thug 4) by Wahida Clark
#7 -
When I Get Where I'm Going by Cheryl Robinson
#8 -
Casting the First Stone by Kimberla Lawson Roby
#9 -
The Sex Chronicles: Shattering the Myth by Zane
Non-fiction
#1 -
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning
Marable
#2 -
Confessions of a Video Vixen by Karrine Steffans
#3 -
Dear G-Spot: Straight Talk About Sex and Love by
Zane
#4 -
Letters to a Young Brother: MANifest Your Destiny
by Hill Harper
#5 -
Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What
You're Going Through by Iyanla Vanzant
#6 -
Selected Writings and Speeches of Marcus Garvey
by Marcus Garvey
#7 -
The Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish by Freda
DeKnight
#8 -
The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors by
Frances Cress Welsing
#9 -
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin
Woodson
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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.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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created 7 May 2007
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