Richard Prince’s Book Notes?: Serious Again
With fall approaching, summer reading gives way to more serious fare. Since it’s been a while since the last column solely on books by or about black journalists, this list of 10 nonfiction titles includes some catching up as well as some books newly published.
Tony Brown
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Tony Brown, new dean of the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University, has “What Mama Taught Me: The Seven Core Values of Life,” (Quill, $13.95, paper).
Brown, host of the long-running “Tony Brown’s Journal” on public television and author of two previous books, “Black Lies, White Lies” and “Empower the People,” uses examples from throughout his career of using the media to advocate for self-empowerment. The seven values of the title are: “Reality — the value of being yourself,” “Knowledge — the value of understanding your purpose,” “Race — the value of honoring your humanity,” “History — the value of investing in the future,” “Truth — the value of being true to yourself,” “Patience — the value of ‘keeping the faith,'” and “Love — the value of living joyfully.”
In the “Truth” chapter, Brown makes his point with a reference to Black Entertainment Television. “The problem is that BET owes Black people and it refuses to pay them — even to acknowledge the debt,” Brown writes. “A very profitable BET that truly cared about Black people and demonstrated the way to sensitivity in its programming could have led the way to an even more profitable company and paved the way for the Black community’s self-empowerment decades ago. Had BET shared a vision of empowerment for the Black community, it could have been a true pioneer in helping build a new reality for Aframericans.”
Howard W. French
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Howard W. French, chief of the New York Times’ Shanghai bureau, offers “A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa,” (Knopf, $25) based on his time in the ’90s as Times bureau chief for West and Central Africa.
“I’d like to suggest that the entire book should be of interest to black journalists,” French told Journal-isms, “just as I feel that African Americans in general should pay far greater attention to Africa. The fact that we don’t, I believe, is one of the most damaging legacies of our common experience of slavery. Nearly every other immigrant group in the United States maintains more substantive ties with its country or region of origin than we do. Africa suffers terribly for the lack of constituency it might enjoy, and black Americans, I would argue, suffer for reasons of culture and identity.”
William Reno, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “Though his book is full of personal experiences, French reminds us that there is much more to Africa than bad news, and that where there is bad news, there is more to it than meets the eye. What places this book above the rest is how French makes connections between present disasters, past history and especially how that reflects Africa’s place in the world.”
Sam Fulwood III
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Sam Fulwood III, Metro columnist for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, has a collection of his columns, “Full of It: Strong Words and Fresh Thinking for Cleveland” (Gray & Co., $24.95). Fulwood arrived at the Plain Dealer in 2000 to write a three-times-a-week column after serving time in the Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau and writing a 1996 memoir, “Waking From the Dream: My Life in the Black Middle Class,” in which he argued that being in the first generation of Southern blacks to have access to white institutions hadn’t lived up to the hype.
Now 48, Fulwood seems happier in Cleveland, though he writes in the preface, “Working and living in Cleveland isn’t the easiest thing to do. Old timers have long memories and are slow to embrace newcomers, partly because the city and its people have been burned and abused so often. But I’m a stranger no more.”
His current columns are online on the Plain Dealer Web site.
Donald Hunt
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Donald Hunt, sportswriter at the Philadelphia Tribune, collaborates with former Temple University stars Aaron McKie and Eddie Jones to write a biography of fabled Temple coach John Chaney, “Chaney: Playing for a Legend” (Triumph Books, $24). Bill Cosby contributes a foreward.
“Coach Chaney, Aaron McKie and Eddie Jones have a terrific story to tell that would be of great interest to many black sports journalists,” Hunt told Journal-isms.
“Aaron and Eddie could have done this book with a lot of journalists. However, it means a lot to me and The Philadelphia Tribune, the country’s oldest black newspaper, that they wanted me to write their story. They didn’t say to me, ‘Well, I want somebody from The Washington Post to do this book.’ I’ve known Aaron since he was 16. I’ve known Eddie since his freshman year at Temple. As far as Coach Chaney is concerned, I was a student at Lincoln University when he was a basketball coach at Cheyney State back in the ’70s. I’ve also known him for quite a while.
“If you’re a journalist who enjoys a compelling story . . . then you’ll like this book. I’m sure you’ll learn about basketball, but more importantly you’ll [learn] about life.”
Charisse Jones
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Charisse Jones, New York correspondent for USA Today, is co-writer of “Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America” (Harper Collins, $25.95) with Kumea Shorter-Gooden, Ph.D.
Jones told the Black Issues Book Review last year that the book “speaks of the masks we black women don, the emotional ripples that we weather trying to survive in the face of relentless racism and sexism. It speaks of how we hurt, but also of how we fight back and lean on family and faith to cope, thrive and soar.
“As an African American woman, I understood the concept of shifting implicitly. I had done it my entire life, as when I took care not to use slang when speaking with my white peers or when I debated whether to report the cab driver who brazenly passed me by or to snuff my rage, pushing the slight into the recesses of my mind. All the changing, ignoring, self-affirming and battling that I had to do to achieve or simply to keep my self-esteem afloat became second nature. I had never thought to put a name to it.
“Despite a career in which I often wrote about race relations and the issue of identity, the idea of writing a book was an abstract goal — until the day I received a call from an agent, Todd Shuster. He was interested in doing a book about the lives of African American women. I agreed that we were a more-than-worthy topic.”
The publisher joined Jones with Shorter-Gooden, and the two developed a survey to help gauge the experiences of black women throughout the country. “It was the foundation of what became the African American Women’s Voices Project, the largest, most comprehensive study to date of African American women’s perceptions and experiences of racial and gender bias,” she said, and the foundation for this book, which last month won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Yanick Rice Lamb
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Yanick Rice Lamb, founding editor of BET Weekend and former editor of Heart and Soul magazine, now teaches journalism at Howard University. She is co-author of “Born to Win: The Authorized Biography of Althea Gibson” (Wiley, $24.95), with Frances Clayton Gray, Gibson’s confidante and caretaker and executor of her estate.
This is one of two new books on Gibson, who died a year ago at age 76 and was the first African American to break the color line in tournament tennis. The other is “The Match” (Amistad, $24.95) by Bruce Schoenfeld, which tracks the parallel lives and friendship of Gibson and the British player Angela Buxton.
“‘Born to Win’ is worth reading to get a fuller picture of Althea Gibson’s life and legacy, as well as the times in which she made history,” Lamb told Journal-isms. “Lots of people know that she integrated tournament tennis, but less is known about her days as the first African American in the Ladies Professional Golf Association or the variety of other things that she did.”
Gibson lived long before lucrative tennis tours, prize money and product endorsements, and one who now enjoys those benefits, Venus Williams, acknowledges her debt in an afterword. The book features more than 35 rare photographs, and an excerpt appears in the September issue of Black Enterprise magazine.
When Gibson died, the Greensboro (N.C.) News and Record wrote: “If Althea Gibson hadn’t used a tennis racket to break through the racial barriers of a half-century ago, players like Arthur Ashe and the Williams sisters might have been destined to segregated obscurity. But Gibson’s hard-won accomplishments on and off the court in a much different world mostly are memories. In later years debilitating illnesses led to a reclusive lifestyle — she was not forgotten but hardly remembered.
“Yet we too easily forget those who through determination and perseverance overcame overwhelming odds to achieve unheard of accomplishments. . . . her character, courage and abilities opened doors not only for athletes, but for all women.”
Yvonne Latty and Ron Tarver
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Yvonne Latty, an obituary writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, and Ron Tarver, a longtime photographer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, produced “We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, from World War II to the War in Iraq” (Amistad/HarperCollins, $25), a collection of first-person accounts that, as reported in June, gave the two the opportunity to publicize the veterans’ stories — and to help maintain a memorial to them in Philadelphia.
It was an obituary that planted the seed for the book.
Latty “got a call from a veteran, asking her to write an obituary to his hero, a black World War II submarine steward named George Ingram. Despite being limited to washing dishes and other menial tasks, Ingram served honorably and even saved a fellow soldier’s life during a vicious storm,” as Sono Motoyama wrote in the Philadelphia Daily News.
With the war in Iraq continuing, “We Were There,” with its firsthand accounts of what war is really like, is no doubt the most timely book on this list.
“We Gulf War vets were welcomed home,” says Lester Outterbridge, who served in both Vietnam and in the Gulf War, in the book. “But in the same breath we were called liars. We were told that there was no gas, even when it was proved that gas was used. Why are so many of us getting sick? Why are so many of us getting Lou Gehrig’s disease and brain tumors? One lady in my unit died of a brain tumor. I have a friend in a wheelchair. I can’t tell you how many guys call me for support. I’ve had guys say they are ready to kill themselves. The only thing that keeps my sanity is my belief in God.”
Tarver’s photographs are on display through November at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
Eugene Robinson
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Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post’s assistant managing editor for the Style section, has “Last Dance in Havana: The Final Days of Fidel and the Start of the New Cuban Revolution” (Free Press, $25).
Robinson, a former Post foreign editor and South American correspondent, combined a memoir with an exploration of Brazil’s complex approach to race in 1999’s “Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race.” But he has been fascinated also by Cuba.
He writes here, “There’s a national newscast on Cuban television every night at eight, but it’s slow and stilted, and everyone knows it’s far from complete. The music of Cuba is the real news. Those who make the music are the real journalists, analysts, social commentators. To understand what’s happening in Cuba, you have to meet the musicians and listen to their fabulous music.
“Then you have to go out and dance.”
In the publicity material, Robinson writes of Cuban hip-hop, saying it “presents the most obvious and interesting political challenge to Fidel Castro. Cuban rappers are careful not to explicitly voice opposition to the government, which would mark them as dissidents and get their music banned — and, possibly, get them tossed in jail. Indeed, many say they are socialists who want to improve the Cuban revolution, not destroy it. But the rappers manage to confront the powers that be with an in-your-face message that tests the grounds of the permissible in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.”
“The book is not without its faults,” author Tom Miller wrote in a Post book review. “The breezy, informative and friendly writing occasionally suffers from unnecessarily repeated introductions of people, ideas and places, a surfeit of metaphors . . . In all, though, ‘Last Dance in Havana’ gives as reliable a sense as you are likely to find of what it’s like to live in Cuba’s capital right now, who your neighbors are and the soundtrack that accompanies you throughout the day and night.”
Lawrence C. Ross Jr.
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Lawrence C. Ross Jr., a freelancer who wrote in 2001 about black Greeks in “The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities,” has followed up with “The Ways of Black Folks: A Year in the Life of a People” (Dafina, $24; paper, $15)
“As I finished ‘The Divine Nine,'” Ross writes, “I began to wonder if we as African Americans were connected by our stories. And because I have always felt an intimate kinship exists among all the people throughout the African Diaspora, I began to wonder about the stories of people I had not yet met, such as black people in Brazil, Jamaica, Canada, and Europe. Are we connected beyond the obvious bond of our ancestors having been in slavery? Do we retain elements of Africa that could provide the sinew for our commonality? And how do African Diasporans view life in other countries, and how do they think others view them, particularly in Mother Africa, a land that so often carries the hopes and dreams of our people?” He says his book is about “ordinary stories by ordinary people. It is that simple,” and that he traveled around the diaspora seeking those stories.
Ross says he encountered a woman who “adamantly refused to be called African American because she believed that she had no connection with the African continent or its people. She just wanted to be known as a black woman, no more and no less.” But, Ross concludes, “The African-ness of our being remains in our speech, our manner of worship, our food, and millions of small and large traits that continue to make us who we are. In my opinion, to think of oneself as being just a black man or woman needlessly limits one.”
Robin D. Stone
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Robin D. Stone, who has been executive editor of Essence magazine, a vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists and an editor at the New York Times, now teaches at New York University and has authored “No Secrets, No Lies: How Black Families Can Heal from Sexual Abuse” (Broadway Books, $23.95).
“The book is a resource for anyone seeking to understand and explain childhood sexual abuse in the context of [b]lack culture and history,” Stone told Journal-isms.
“Child sexual abuse is a critical factor at the root of many social and health ills — but it is rarely addressed or explored when looking at issues like depression, drug and alcohol abuse, prostitution, violence and even AIDS. In witting ‘No Secrets,’ I wanted to explore not just the criminal and psychological aspects of child sexual abuse, but the cultural and family dynamics — like distrust of institutions and people in authority, and a reluctance to seek counseling — that keep people from acknowledging or responding.
“‘No Secrets’ has been widely acknowledged as a significant contribution to the literature on child sexual abuse,” she continues. “There’s a lot of research on this subject but much of it is academic, which is off-putting and cumbersome to read. Most books on the market are aimed at a general audience. I wanted to combine the research with narratives of black survivors to make the subject and the solutions much more accessible to a black audience.
“That approach seems to have paid off. Many professionals (psychologists, social workers, drug rehab specialists, etc.) speak of using ‘No Secrets’ in their work with clients, and many readers — survivors and not — have shared how the book gave them a deeper understanding of the causes and effects of child sexual abuse, and how to keep it from occurring altogether.”
Stone is a 1988 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Editing Program for Minority Journalists.
