John Avlon, Jesse Angelo and Errol Louis
Jared A. Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Rachel L. Swarns
Baratunde Thurston
Richard Prince’s Book Notes™: Stocking Stuffers (Part 1)
Books by and about journalists of color might make provocative holiday gifts, and more of them are available in ebook and audio versions. This list of nonfiction includes humorous, in-your-face takes on being black; collections of columns by legendary opinion writers; an answer to a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Malcolm X; a 30-years-later look at journalists of the 1970s; a study of how television covered the civil rights era; and an examination of Michelle Obama‘s multiracial ancestry. A continuation of this list will be published in coming days.
John Avlon, Jesse Angelo and Errol Louis
John Avlon, Jesse Angelo and Errol Louis have edited “Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns” (Overlook, $29.95, cloth; $17.95, paper; Nook version, $10.99), and “Deadline Artists–Scandals, Tragedies and Triumphs: More of America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns” (Overlook, $29.95, cloth; Nook version, $14.99).
The publisher argues that, “At a time of great transition in the news media, when obituaries for newspapers are being written every day, Deadline Artists makes the case for the continued relevance of opinion journalism. Beloved but half-remembered columns that were gathering dust in libraries or moldering on microfilm are now available in one volume, celebrating the near-miracle that stories composed on daily deadlines can resonate with beauty and power decades later.”
Bloggers might note the art and skill that accompany good opinion writing.
Avlon is senior columnist for Newsweek and the Daily Beast as well as a CNN contributor. Angelo is editor-in-chief of the Daily, the made-for-iPad “newspaper” that announced this week it was ending publication. Louis, a black journalist, is the political anchor of NY1 News.
Unlike comparable collections, these volumes make an effort at diversity. Alongside Thomas L. Friedman, Ernie Pyle, Red Smith and Mark Twain are Langston Hughes, Frederick Douglass, Carl T. Rowan, Stanley Crouch, William Raspberry, Leonard Pitts Jr., Eugene Robinson, Cynthia Tucker and Bob Herbert, all African Americans. The first volume, released last year, featured no Hispanics, Native Americans or Asian Americans. A sequel, “Deadline Artists–Scandals, Tragedies and Triumphs: More of America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns,” was published last month, and slain Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar is included.
Jared A. Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs
Jared A. Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs, who teach communication studies at Morgan State University, edited “A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X” (Black Classic Press, $18.95, paper).
The late Manning Marable‘s “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for history despite strong dissent from several 
politically active black scholars when the book was published. Ball and Burroughs have assembled the contributions of 19 of the critics.
“Marable’s ‘definitive masterpiece’ was to us a mere tombstone: a 600-page eulogy that attempted to lay permanently to rest the Malcolm X that we knew and revered,” Ball writes. “Indeed, it aimed to bury the very ideas that produced Malcolm X and those he made his own, our own. The book attacked the very ideas that made Malcolm X and all Black people then, and now, dangerous.” Burroughs writes that the book had to be written to correct the record. “. . . Our larger commitment to historical memory dwarfs any concerns about offending Manning Marable’s admirers, colleagues, friends, and students.”
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Aniko Bodroghkozy, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, has “Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement” (University of Illinois Press, $50, cloth).
“Equal Time” examines the news media’s contemporary coverage of the civil rights movement, including that by the black press, and the effects of the movement on prime-time television entertainment in the 1960s and ’70s. Chapters are devoted to coverage of the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965, and in entertainment to Diahann Carroll‘s “Julia” and the Norman Lear-produced “Good Times.”
Bodroghkozy writes, “Both civil rights activists and Southern segregationists understood the political power of television, and both were interested in using this new instrument to speak to national (read: non-Southern) audiences.
“The former were clearly more successful in negotiating with the medium, but network television was not interested in doing the bidding of even the most moderate of civil rights groups, nor was television bent on always demonizing and dismissing the segregationist position. If a civil rights group could be labeled ‘militant’ — and we will see NBC’s Chet Huntley so label the NAACP in 1959 — then that group could be legitimated as a political player as segregationists cheered and welcomed Huntley in as potentially one of their own.”
In an epilogue on the Obama era, Bodroghkozy writes, “While it is both reductive and simplistic to suggest that network television’s circulation and audiences’ embrace of certain types of black representation have led to the election of a black president, this book has traced the mobilization of a certain type of image that, when appropriately paired with figures of whiteness, were presumed to make whites less anxious about social change.”
Television news personnel, engaging in “a certain amount of utopian gushing” after Obama’s election, “probably had no idea that they were borrowing from an old script. . . . “
Donna Britt
Donna Britt, former columnist for the Washington Post, has “Brothers (& me): A memoir of loving and giving” (Little, Brown and Co., $25.99, cloth and audio; $12.99 ebook; Kindle edition, $11.04; Nook version, $12.99.)
Britt wrote a version of this message to fellow columnists last year as this book was released:
“The holidays are perfect for diving into and for sharing with readers Brothers (and me), an exploration of women’s intriguing penchant for giving. Library Journal calls the book ‘more personal but no less significant’ than Condoleezza Rice‘s memoir, and the Boston Globe describes it as ‘alternately raw and elegant… a wrenching examination of a life through the prism of racism, sexism, and unconditional devotion.’
“Brothers traces how my male-steeped life as the twice-married sister of three brothers and mother of three sons taught me to give — sometimes unwisely— to men, a problem shared by millions of women. My own giving was inspired by loss: The inexplicable, decades-ago death of my brother at the hands of hometown police, an uncalled-for killing that years later would be echoed in Trayvon Martin’s slaying.
“Darrell’s death taught me how inextricably loss and giving are intertwined for black women, whose experiences with the endangerment, diminishment and deaths of our husbands, lovers, sons and, yes, brothers causes many of us to reflexively protect, support and give to them in response. Brothers (and me) encourages giving women to trace their own journeys to giving and to utilize this gift more wisely.”
Britt believes in plumbing her emotions and has delivered an Oprah-ready saga that includes some surprises about her personal life. She also adheres to a principle followed by the best writers: every word is carefully selected.
This month, Britt writes on her website, “in the spirit of the holiday, I’ll for the next 25 days give in to the giving impulse that’s all too natural to me. Each day until Christmas, I’ll offer a different mindful gift: to students, seniors, friends, total strangers, even to myself. . . . Brothers (and me) described my journey from questioning to celebrating my giving. My goal now is to demonstrate that mindful giving expands the giver regardless of how the gift is received. But real life is unpredictable, so stay tuned as I test my theory while blogging — frankly, honestly — about each day’s gift and what emerges.”
Wayne Dawkins
Wayne Dawkins, assistant professor of journalism at Hampton University, has “City Son: Andrew W. Cooper’s Impact on Modern-Day Brooklyn” (University Press of Mississippi, $35, cloth and ebook; Kindle edition, $19.25; Nook version, $22.75.)
As Dawkins writes on the book jacket, the City Sun was “a feisty Brooklyn-based weekly that published from 1984 to 1996. Whether the stories were about Mayor Koch or Rev. Al Sharpton, Howard Beach or Crown Heights, Tawana Brawley‘s dubious rape allegations, the Daily News Four trial, or Spike Lee‘s filmmaking career, Cooper’s City Sun commanded attention and moved officials and readers to action.”
The weekly tabloid broke the mold for the black press, criticizing African American officials along with other powers that be.
Cooper, who died in 2002, gave Dawkins a start in journalism at Trans Urban News Service in the 1970s. Cooper’s widow, Jocelyn C. Cooper, asked Dawkins to write her husband’s biography. In a cover blurb, Dawkins’ Hampton colleague Earl Caldwell, the veteran journalist and Maynard Institute co-founder, calls the book “chock full of significant and compelling stories not previously told.”
Written for academic audiences as well as a more general audience, Dawkins told Journal-isms, “Since July publication, City Son is listed in at least 110 mostly campus libraries [dominant states, NY-NJ, Calif., Miss.-Tenn.], including Canada, Wales, Australia and the Netherlands.
“Journalists of color should read this book if they want to understand the resurrection of Brooklyn as a destination [AWC can take credit for the Brooklyn Nets dribbling along Flatbush and Atlantic avenues]. ‘City Son’ also chronicles the hot-button cases of the ’80s: Howard Beach/Tawana Brawley/Central Park Jogger assault [subject of a new Ken Burns documentary]. And, it’s a good read about a newspaper that had a remarkable 12-year run. Dozens of their journalists continue to practice at other outlets.”
