Richard Prince’s Book Notes™: For Holiday Giving
Last week, this column listed books by or about black journalists on the craft of journalism. Now we report on those who practiced that craft this year in book-length form. Some have told nonfiction tales in novelistic ways; others provide insights on public figures or pressing social issues straight from the headlines. A few will make you laugh; others will cause you to shake your head. All are presented in time for holiday gift-giving.
Jabari Asim
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Jabari Asim’s “The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why” (Houghton Mifflin, $26) made lists of the year’s best or favorite books at at least three newspapers.
In the Washington Post’s Book World, where until this summer Asim was deputy editor, Peniel E. Joseph called “The N Word” “a brilliant and bracing history lesson for the countless pundits debating the virtues of black popular culture.”
In the Capital Times in Madison, Wis., Shauna Rhone wrote, “Asim’s book gives a strong layer of knowledge to enhance any debate.”
“Yes, that word,” said the Chicago Tribune. “No, it’s not ever acceptable, and Jabari Asim will explain why.”
“‘The N Word’ takes a look at the use of the word from the 1600s to the present and how it has transformed from being a source of hate and degradation to one of endearment for many young people,” Nicholas Davis wrote in the Toronto Sun as Asim spoke in that city.
“‘Hearing young blacks call themselves the N word doesn’t make sense to me,’ says Asim, who has five children ranging in age from 6 to 24. ‘I understand the term of endearment thing and the kinship African American men have with each other. I celebrate that kinship and take it very seriously. But calling each other the N word is very unimaginative.
“‘To me, it’s hard to find a word less suitable to express that kinship. Brother fits so much better. Why not use a word that means endearment [rather] than one that means hate?”
Asim now edits the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis.
Cora Daniels
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Cora Daniels, a freelancer and former writer for Fortune magazine, has “Ghettonation: A Journey Into the Land of Bling and the Home of the Shameless” (Doubleday, $23.95).
“Daniels looks at the everyday, practical matter of living in a racist culture and how difficult it is to resist internalizing that racism,” Leah Samuel wrote in the Progressive.
“‘Ghettonation’ is as plainspoken as its title, identifying and addressing the practices and practitioners of ‘ghetto,’ defined by Daniels as ‘actions that seem to go against basic home training and common sense.’ She points out such actions in the streets and in office suites, from New York to Hollywood and everywhere in between.”
“Yet even as Daniels makes worthwhile observations and displays a wry wit about a troubling subject,” William Jelani Cobb wrote in the Washington Post, “‘Ghettonation’ falls into one of the most common and troubling pitfalls of these discussions: lumping damaging behaviors (criminality, drug abuse) together with simply distasteful ones. That is to say, bad etiquette is not shorthand for bad character, but the singular term ‘ghetto’ irrevocably conflates the two. ([Bill] Cosby, for instance, linked people who steal with those who give their children colorful names such as ‘Shaniqua.’)
“Still, it is difficult to disagree with Daniels’ core thesis: that a blinkered mindset lies at the heart of many of the problems we see and associate with ‘ghetto.’ And in raising this point, she offers one insight that transcends the morass of racism-versus-personal-responsibility arguments that we are currently mired in. Whether the ghetto mentality is a product of limited opportunities or personal failings, changing one’s mind is clearly the prerequisite to changing one’s circumstances.”
Lewis Diuguid
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Lewis Diuguid, columnist, editorial writer and vice president for community resources at the Kansas City Star, offers “Discovering the Real America: Toward a More Perfect Union” (Brown Walker Press, paper, $49.95).
“The first half of ‘Discovering the Real America’ explains where we are with diversity, how we got there and why we can’t stay,” Diuguid told Journal-isms. It “exposes troubling aspects of the United States, its ugly history and how the nation has failed to live up to its constitutional guarantees. The second half . . . focuses on how people can discover the real America. The book offers formulas on how to make that happen and gives journalists instruction on what they must do to enlarge their experiences so they can provide more accurate and culturally competent diverse stories to the public.”
The 568-page book, which is being pitched as a college text, “provides hundreds of examples of bigotry in the negative feedback I routinely get when I write on issues of race and diversity. Those cited in ‘Discovering the Real America’ were culled from thousands of e-mail, voice mail, letters and faxes I have collected since 1997. Exposing such feedback is significant in this era of the news media providing writers’ phone numbers and e-mail addresses to the public in the interest of being more open. Writers and editors have to know how to be prepared for such reactions from the public, what to do with it and how not to let the caustic, bigoted comments prevent the press from covering diverse stories in the future.”
And, Diuguid said, journalists should know that “by not telling the stories of the Real America, the news media help to perpetuate the stereotypes, the prejudices, the bigotry and white privilege — all ugly hallmarks of this country.”
Cecil Harris and Larryette Kyle-DeBose
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Cecil Harris, a freelance sports journalist and author of a book on blacks in hockey, returns with “Charging the Net: A History of Blacks in Tennis From Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe to the Williams Sisters,” written with Larryette Kyle-DeBose, player-captain in the Atlanta Lawn Tennis Association (Ivan R. Dee, $26.95).
“‘Charging the Net’ is a wide-ranging history,” pop culture writer Touré said in the New York Times Book Review, “built on more than 65 interviews, that tells in-depth stories about the lives of black tennis stars like Venus and Serena; Arthur Ashe; Althea Gibson, the Wimbledon champ from Harlem who ended up broke, reclusive and bitter; and Zina Garrison, the Wimbledon finalist who, during her career, was dragged down by bulimia and a husband who, she says, encouraged her to stay on the tour so he could continue his affair with one of her friends.
“The authors cover the tennis diaspora, discussing famous umpires like Cecil Hollins, who feels he was kept from advancement by racism; legendary coaches like Dr. Robert Johnson, who molded Ashe; and the French stars Yannick Noah and Gael Monfils. There are some strange choices — they barely mention two Africans now on the tour, Hicham Arazi and Younes el-Aynaoui, both from Morocco, but give several pages to the Wimbledon winner Evonne Goolagong, an Australian aborigine. . . .”
The authors “make racism a recurring theme, arguing that it has dealt a devastating blow to black tennis dreams. They write, ‘The unspoken but persistent vibe that you are not welcome, that others would be happier if you went away, a vibe that black tennis players have sensed on the main tour for decades, makes it difficult to find the rhythm and comfort zone needed to perform at your best.’ Leslie Allen, who played on the women’s tour in the ’80s, when players frequently stayed with host families rather than in hotels, says housing was often hard to find: ‘I’d go to a tournament where the family wanted to house the No. 1 seed. But when that family found out that the No. 1 seed was me, then suddenly the housing disappeared.’ The great coach John Wilkerson, who taught Garrison, says black players (in the authors’ words) ‘have not won more major championships because too many of them believe deep down that they don’t belong in the sport.'”
Marcus Mabry
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Marcus Mabry, an editor overseeing international business coverage at the New York Times, has “Twice As Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power” (Modern Times, $27.50). Since this biography was published in April, at least two other journalists, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post and Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, have written books about the secretary of state, the most prominent African American in the Bush administration.
But Mabry, who wrote this while chief of correspondents at Newsweek magazine, which excerpted it, remains the only black journalist to have written Rice’s biography.
“‘Twice As Good’ tackles race, her family’s complicated — and often surprising — history with black folks, Rice’s understanding of race in her own life, as well as race’s crucial role in Rice’s successes and failures, with an intimacy and sophistication the other books can’t touch,” Mabry told Journal-isms.
“To get at the most sensitive details of Rice’s childhood — including her father’s first marriage and his relationship with Stokely Carmichael, and her mother’s family’s arrogance — and her own estranged relationship [with] her only Rice cousin, who told me she figured the family cut her off because she was poor— I spent a lot of time with 80-year-old Southern black church ladies who, frankly, have never had an intimate, trusting relationship with a white person.”
Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher
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Washington Post colleagues Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher authored “Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas” (Doubleday, $26.95).
They became the go-to guys when the conflicted Supreme Court justice released his own autobiography in October, six months later. In a front-page piece in the New York Times Book Review, Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson called the journalists’ work an “impeccably researched and probing biography,” noting that the authors “conducted hundreds of interviews with Thomas’s friends, relatives and colleagues . . . in addition to doing extensive archival research.”
The book “brilliantly illuminates not only Thomas but his turbulent times, the burden of race in 20th-century America, and one man’s painful and unsettling struggle, along with his changing nation’s, to be relieved of it,” Patterson wrote.
Merida told Journal-isms, “For those who want to really understand the second African American Supreme Court justice in the nation’s history, ‘Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas’ goes beyond easy definition and caricature. We are the first black journalists to do a biography on one of the most complicated, controversial figures in public life, a powerful black man who is estranged from much of the black population. In probing Clarence Thomas’s life, we tried to explore in a nuanced and sophisticated way questions of racial identity that are at the heart of our struggles as a people and as a nation. Given he has released his own memoir, our book is a good place to turn for a more rigorous, deeply reported examination of the events and themes of his life.”
A paperback edition is scheduled for April 8.
Shaun Powell
Shaun Powell, sports
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columnist at Newsday, has “Souled Out?: How Blacks Are Winning and Losing in Sports” (Human Kinetics, $22.95).
“This isn’t a multi-cultural examination of sports,” Powell says in the promotional material for this book. “This is about the fascinating modern day American black athlete, the burden he carries, the racism he gets and the racism he imagines, his triumphs and failures, his friends and enemies and why he’s the only one dancing in the end zone.”
“Powell outlines how a growing division in black athlete character, conduct and lifestyle choices impacts how America sees the race. He calls out the athletes involved in over-the-top end zone celebrations and confrontations done with little or no regard for sportsmanship and suggests, ‘These are the images commonly attached to black athletes, only because a few are willing to play those roles. When they do, they cultivate stereotypes. They give ammunition to the bigots and the ignorant,'” the publisher writes.
The media come in for their share of criticism. An early anecdote tells how, in 2005, Darius Miles of the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers called Coach Maurice Cheeks the N word as the team watched film of a losing game. When the story leaked out, “because Miles was black, the watchdog media performed a collective shrug, sensing the public was okay with blacks calling each other that word,” Powell writes.
“Among Powell’s heroes are [sports’] militant icons of the 1960s, notably Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the African-American Olympians who raised their black-gloved fists and bowed their heads as the national anthem serenaded them on the medal stand,” Kirk Wessler wrote in the Peoria (Ill.) Journal-Star. “But his admiration for them reaches beyond what that gesture symbolized at the time. Powell celebrates that the silent dignity with which Smith and Carlos made their stand ultimately caused the world at large to honor these men once reviled.”
“Souled Out” has been praised by both black and white sportswriters. Wessler is white. Bryan Burwell, columnist with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, told sportswriting colleagues in the National Association of Black Journalists, “I can tell you all that Shaun has written something remarkable and powerful. Everyone who has a voice and an opportunity to read this and review it should spread the word. Shaun, my brother, you kicked big time butt on this one.”
Powell replied, “My hope is that this book, which is timely in some ways with regard to what’s going on in sports, helps educate and enlighten those who desperately need it. We all know somebody like that.”
Staff of the Washington Post
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“Being a Black Man: At the Corner of Progress and Peril” (PublicAffairs, $13.95, paper) is the book version of the award-winning series published in the Washington Post and on washingtonpost.com, with some notable additions. It is credited to “the staff of the Washington Post” and edited by Kevin Merida, the associate editor who supervised editing of the series.
Publishers Weekly said:
“Tackling the thorny subject of America’s black men and their place in the national experience with balanced analysis and superb writing, Washington Post staff writers don’t miss a beat. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Edward P. Jones sets the tone with an astute introduction about growing up without a father in D.C. and the emotional complications of lacking mentoring. Excellent journalistic features include Michael A. Fletcher’s title piece, ‘At the Corner of Progress and Peril,’ examining the many missed opportunities of these besieged men; Stephen A. Holmes and Richard Morin’s insightful exploration of how black men perceive themselves, ‘A Portrait Shaded with Promise and Doubt’; and Robert E. Pierre’s ‘The Young Apprentice,’ which reveals a college-educated couple’s preparation of their son to enter the world. [Krissah] Williams offers a candid meditation on eligible black men in ‘Singled Out,’ while David Finkel writes powerfully on ‘The Meaning of Work.’ Covering sociological, psychological and spiritual topics, the book provides a comprehensive view of the African-American man in contemporary America.”
Merida told Journal-isms the book is “an anthology that allows readers to experience how black men live and think. You get to see them dream and struggle, succeed, fail and persevere in ways not often chronicled in the daily media. Through in-depth portraits of individual black men in the Washington region, subjects such as health care, education, ideology, criminal justice, ‘thug life,’ working-class values and fatherhood are given faces and voices. The book also includes extensive polling data on black men, an interview with BET founder Bob Johnson, an introduction by novelist Edward P. Jones, an essay by columnist Gene Robinson, and transcripts of a discussion on spirituality and a documentary on the path to prison. In sum, it is a good resource for anyone wishing to delve deeply into the lives of black men.”
René Syler
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René Syler, former coanchor of CBS’s “The Early Show,” has “Good-Enough Mother: The Perfectly Imperfect Book of Parenting” (Simon & Schuster, $22.95 hard covers, $14.95 paper), written with Karen Moline, a journalist, novelist and ghostwriter.
Syler “takes readers on her journey of trying to combine a high-profile career with motherhood of two children,” Jenny Deam wrote in the Denver Post.
“While the idea is good and she unabashedly admits to sometimes failing to make the right choices and struggling with her own expectations, it may be hard for readers to relate to her life. For example, in her chapter about racism, the example she uses is trying to return a leased Mercedes and being treated rudely because she wasn’t dressed up.
“The most compelling installment came at the end when she talked about not only being fired from her job at CBS but also deciding to undergo a double mastectomy as cancer prevention. You gain a whole different kind of admiration for her by book’s end.”
In the Washington Post, Jill Hudson Neal praised Syler’s “quick, easy prose and biting humor.”
Syndicated book critic Terri Schlichenmeyer said, “If you’re new to parenting, this is a good enough book, although there should be a healthy dose of reading-between-the-lines. If you’re looking for a parenting book for real life, though, ‘Good-Enough Mother’ is only so-so.”
Ron Stodghill
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Ron Stodghill, editorial director of six magazines published by the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, has “Redbone: Money, Malice, and Murder in Atlanta” (Amistad, $25.95).
“There’s a sadness that runs through ‘Redbone,’ a poignant tale recounting the stunning murder of Atlanta businessman Lance Herndon, who achieved prominence in the African-American community’s nouveau riche set but came to a gruesome end, bludgeoned in his own bed,” Lorrie Lykins wrote in the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times.
Stodghill, an editor-in-chief of the late Savoy magazine who has just left the New York Times Sunday business section, where he was a reporter, told Journal-isms, “‘Redbone’ sort of stands alone within the canon of black lit, I think, and here’s why:
“The work opens up a new genre for black journalists in that it is a work of reportage involving a true crime within the African American elite. Told in the spirit of Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood,’ or Mailer’s ‘Executioner’s Song,’ or Berendt’s ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,’ ‘Redbone’ uses the devices of the novelist — dialogue, setting, characterization, point of view, etc.— to examine a tragic death in the black community, and to peel back the curtain of the modern black nouveau riche. It is a true piece of investigative journalism that illustrates another manner in which to tell our complex stories in ways that enlighten, provoke and entertain.
“Within our community, we have our own gripping tales —many of which do not occur on street corners — and it is up to black journalists to tell them with the richness that newspapers and magazines have yet to encourage. Based on my research, ‘Redbone’ represents the first work of black true crime —by this, I mean, a work with virtually all black subjects by a black journalist.”
Lykins wrote, “Stodghill skillfully pieces together a true crime story and courtroom drama that reads like a novel.”
Hal Jacobs wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “The author does an amazing job of getting people to talk to him.”
On National Public Radio’s “News & Notes,” Stodghill told Farai Chideya that in a movie version, he’d like to see Don Cheadle play Herndon and Halle Berry the femme fatale.
Sonsyrea Tate
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Sonsyrea Tate, editor of the weekly Washington Informer, has “Do Me Twice: My Life After Islam” (Strebor Books, $15, paper). “In her first book, ‘Little X: Growing Up in the Nation of Islam,’ published in 1997, Tate focused on her adolescence in Northeast Washington in an African American Muslim family full of love, contradictions and hypocrisy,” Lisa Frazier Page wrote in the Washington Post.
“. . . That piece of her story wasn’t nearly the half of it.”
Tate told Journal-isms, “Journalists writing about Muslims and Nation of Islam members need to understand that they’re writing about humans and families with the same problems and joys as anyone else. This book lays plain one young woman’s daily struggles and triumphs.
“I’ve been told my memoirs are particularly insightful inasmuch as they take you inside the Muslim schools where we were drilled on, ‘The Caucasian, White Man, Yacub’s drafted devil, the skunk! Of the planet Earth!’ My God, it took almost 20 years to debrief myself from such nonsense. The public knows of Malcolm X’s journey into and out of Islam, but he was a young adult going in, which was quite different from a child being raised with this indoctrination.
“The book, ‘Do Me Twice,’ refers to having felt ‘done’ twice by Islam, first by the Nation of Islam, then by Orthodox Islam. Ultimately it is about self-determination. ‘I say who, how much, what, when and why.’ It is about me setting my own pace spiritually (and sexually) as are my human rights.”
Carolyn See added in the Post, “If Sonsyrea Tate wrote this memoir to provoke, she certainly succeeded. Her African American mother, who chose to stay home — in accordance with the tenets of her faith — and raise 10 children, is sure to entertain some uncharitable thoughts about her condescending daughter. Her father might feel the same way. Her useless, no-good, philandering, attempted-murdering ex-husband should be hopping mad, too, whether he’s still behind bars or not. But mostly, the elders of Tate’s branch of Islam (‘My family followed Elijah Muhammad’s son into Orthodox Islam when he took over,’ she explains) must right now be searching some theological rule book under ‘F’ for fatwa.”