Prometheus 6

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
Author: Thomas Frank
List price: $25.00 USD

The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank is about how Conservatives, by which I refer to Jack Abramhoff and his confrères Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, started a process that resulted in our government being turned into a cash cow for Conservatives.

The Measure of America: American Human Development Report, 2008-2009 (A Columbia / SSRC Book)
Authora: Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, Eduardo Borges Martins
List price: $24.95 USD

The Measure of America, American Human Development Report 2009-2009, is the first product of the American Human Development Project (AHDP). It applies a standard roughly equivalent to the United Nations' Human Development Index to the United States of America. It is actually pretty remarkable that this has never been done before since the standards by which United States justifies its foreign policy positions claim similar intent.

title:  White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
Kevin M. Kruse
asin:  0691133867
Binding: Paperback
List price: $18.95 USD

White Flight, Atlanta and The Making of Modern Conservatism by Kevin M. Kruse reports the reaction of mainstream white southerners to the events of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and onward. It focuses on Atlanta, GA because there were certain unique aspects to its development, but the same themes run through Atlanta's social history as though the rest of the ex-Confederacy's social history.

Go get some. You got 'till Sunday.

author: Douglas A. Blackmon asin: 0385506252 binding: Hardcover list price: $29.95 USD amazon price: $19.77 USD

In March 2007, People Magazine published an article titled The Last Slaves of Mississippi? which told the story of Mae Miller and her family, who were said to be held as slaves until the early 60s. I heard of the article when it was published but didn't read it. Honestly, I wasn't sure I believed it. I felt there was only an outside possibility it was for real and truthfully I may not have wanted proof.

I just read it. In light of the information in Slavery by Another Name, it now sounds plausible.

Jeff Johnson is a writer.

Stuff Parody Writers Like

THE book “Stuff White People Like,” based on the runaway Internet hit of the same name, just made the best-seller list. Apparently, readers felt they were lacking a definitive guide to white, upwardly mobile individuals and their purported interests —“gay friends,” “outdoor performance clothes,” “Barack Obama” and so on. If the road to a best seller (not to mention what’s said to be a $300,000 advance) begins with nothing more than a Web site and a list of likes, then here are a few projects I plan to develop:

An Urban "Street Lit" Retirement
Omar Tyree | Posted June 19, 2008 9:49 AM

For the record, I never called my work "street literature" and I never will. When I began to publish ground breaking contemporary novels with Flyy Girl in 1993, and Capital City in 1994, I called them "urban classics." They were "urban" because they dealt with people of color in the inner-city or "urban" population areas. They were "classics" because I considered myself one of the first to start the work of a new era. But now, after sixteen years and sixteen novels in the African-American adult urban fiction game, I feel like the man who created the monster Frankenstein. Things have gotten way out of hand. So it's now time to put up my pen and move on to something new, until the readership is ready to develop a liking for fresh material on other subjects.

'All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America' by John McWhorter
Hip-hop is too politically impotent to make a difference, the author writes.
By Adam Mansbach
Special to The Times
June 19, 2008

Simultaneously smug and beleaguered, "All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America" raises the question: Who, exactly, is claiming it can? No one -- academic, artist or critic -- has made any such argument since roughly 1988. This puts Manhattan Institute senior fellow John McWhorter in the awkward position of playing provocateur to an empty house, and gives his prose the tone of a petulant undergrad being shouted down in a dorm lounge. It also raises serious doubts about his engagement with either hip-hop or the large body of scholarship about it....

[P6: Bunch of stuff in the middle you should go read]

Jay Jennings is right. On the Laps of Gods is a terrible name for a book about one of the race riots of 1919. 

I saw an ad for this book in the email the NY Times sends out about its book review section. I didn't because he subtitle (The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation) has implications I doubt I could set aside while reading it. 

Oh?

Yes. Wikipedia's article on the topic lists the major race riots of the time and links a NY Times article from 1919 (really cool that you can get such stuff by searching at the Times) that gives you an eye witness overview.

(Written last night, polished a bit this morning)

The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
asin: 0385520360
Binding: Hardcover
List price: $22.95 USD

As I begin my second bottle of Bass Ale on this very humid evening, I think I will begin my review of Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Beautiful Struggle. I actually finished the book almost two weeks ago, but I had a reaction I couldn't verbalize. Apparently I needed to lubricate a few neurons to let a couple of thoughts slide through.

There's a model Black folk must fit in order to be considered for an official public intellectual role. White folks want to see that "up from the ghetto" metaphor. For Black folk that ain't necessary, but we do want to recognize that rhythm, in the speech, the concepts...and it is essentially the same demand for legitimacy as the one white folks express. The difference is Black folks want immediacy where white folks want explanation. Two Irishmen would recognize each other the same way.

The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America
Author: Michael J Thompson
asin: 0231140746
Binding: Hardcover
List price: $32.50 USD

The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America by Michael J. Thompson is an American history. It reaches all the way back to the philosophers of Greece, all the way through Europe to explain the economic ideas current when the United States of America declared its independence. Then it follows the way these ideas were expressed as the economy (and hence the politics) of the nation changed beneath their feet. The overall result was the exchange of our intellectual forbears' sure knowledge that excessive inequality undermines the democracy itself, for the government supported libertarian market economy we now enjoy.

I think I will make room, though.

Neo-Confederacy
A Critical Introduction
Edited by Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich, and Edward H. Sebesta

A century and a half after the conclusion of the Civil War, the legacy of the Confederate States of America continues to influence national politics in profound ways. Drawing on magazines such as Southern Partisan and publications from the secessionist organization League of the South, as well as DixieNet and additional newsletters and websites, Neo-Confederacy probes the veneer of this movement to reveal goals far more extensive than a mere celebration of ancestry.

author: Houston A. Baker asin: 0231139640 binding: Hardcover list price: $24.95 USD amazon price: $16.47 USD

Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era by Houston A. Baker isn’t properly described by its title because it covers a bit more than Black intellectuals. It reminds me a lot of Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. It’s roughly three parts analysis and one part vengeance. Prof. Baker takes aim at a wide array of target, from John McWhorter (for failing to live up to Dr. King’s example) to Irving Kristol (for creating the political movement he feels was key in undermining Black interest). He draws on the writings of Dr. King and W.E.B. DuBois to establish his position, yet never claims to present more than his personal reactions.

"Karibu's demise is a result of the ownership, including myself, failure to resolve conflict in a peaceful way and also a failure to end relationships amicably," he said....

"Simba wanted the company to go national," said Jonathan Robinson, who has managed the Bowie store, one of six in the chain, for two years. Co-owner Hoke "Brother Yao" Glover "felt it wasn't ready for that yet," Robinson said. He added that last fall, Sana's wife, Sunny, who bought books for the stores, abruptly left -- the two are divorcing -- and that customers began to notice that titles weren't coming in.

Black Readers Are Jolted by a Chain's Demise
Loss of Karibu, a Result Of Owners' Rift, Leaves A Hole in a Community
By Lonnae O'Neal Parker and Hamil R. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 24, 2008; A01

By early afternoon, word had spread and dozens of customers crowded the bookstore's aisles. One of the nation's largest black-owned bookstore chains, Karibu, will be closed by mid-February, and people brought their shock and sadness to Bowie Town Center, along with their checkbooks.

They pulled titles from the shelves: civil rights biographies, Harlem Renaissance classics. And they lamented.

Freddie Mills, a security officer who was scanning the aisles as his 2-year-old daughter played nearby, said he was "angry, angry, angry."

"Where are we going to get books for our kids?" he said.

Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come
By BRENT STAPLES

Philip K. Dick was still an obscure pulp novelist known mainly to teenage boys when a friend predicted that he would one day have more impact on the world than celebrated writers like William Faulkner, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. The prediction seemed almost delusional in the 1960s, when Dick was popping pills around the clock and churning out novels in a science fiction ghetto from which he seemed destined never to escape.

He did get out, but only posthumously. And with his recent celebration as the sage of futurism, and his pervasiveness on bookshelves and in Hollywood, the early predictions about the growth of his influence have come to seem prescient.

My favorite Philip K. Dick book was Valis. The kid Horselover Fat found when he searched for God was my favorite character because of the way he handled the test question Horselover's friend asked.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg would surely be amazed by the new Harlem and the new center. His portrait hangs in the lobby, a reminder of the power of a dream. Born in a working-class neighborhood in Santurce, P.R., in 1874, Schomburg was the son of an unwed black midwife or laundress and an unidentified father who was probably of Puerto-Rican and German heritage. After moving to New York in 1891, he befriended political and social leaders and the stars of the Harlem Renaissance, and helped found Las Dos Antillas, an anticolonialist organization....

The celebration tomorrow is from noon to 6 p.m. It will include a performance by the Hamalali Wayunagu Garifuna Dance Company, a screening of “Ethnic Notions” by Marlon Riggs, a staged reading, face painting and a special presentation by the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center.

Harlem’s Cultural Anchor in a Sea of Ideas
By FELICIA R. LEE

YOU could almost see the ghosts among the new furniture and modern recessed lighting. It was a few days before the staff at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, finished hanging two exhibitions and stripping the paper off the doors at its bigger, brighter new entrance. Amid the sounds of hammers and drills, they prepared for tomorrow’s public celebration of the center’s two-year, $11 million renovation.

The Schomburg is as much a monument to an idea as it is a building. So those ghosts, workaday and luminous, inhabit a space of many incarnations, tracing its roots back to the 135th Street New York Public Library branch that opened there in 1905. Predominantly Jewish then, Harlem was mostly black by 1924. Over the years, Alex Haley researched “Roots” at the Schomburg; James Baldwin and Gordon Parks both found it a refuge; a young Ossie Davis honed his craft there.

The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice author: Lee Cokorinos asin: 0742524760 binding: Paperback list price: $30.95 USD amazon price: $30.95 USD

Over the past 20 years, a complex network of conservative think tanks, foundations, and legal advocacy groups has emerged to mount an unprecedented assault on racial and gender diversity. The result has been a fundamental change in the balance of forces defending and opposing the central gains of the civil rights and feminist movements.

The Assault on Diversity documents the rise of an ideologically driven campaign that threatens to put decades of progress in peril and, led by a political minority, is out of step with the consensus of mainstream America. The book provides a comprehensive road map of the anti-diversity movement to guide concerned Americans in the fight to preserve historic gains in civil rights and build a fair and inclusive society.

Read the Executive Summary

“One of the things that culture does is that it works like a family,” Mr. Clayton said. “If you know you come from a good family, it enables you to go out into the world, no matter what happens to you, and do O.K. It is the same thing with culture: If you know you come from a great people, it gives you that same feeling.”

Black History Trove, a Life’s Work, Seeks Museum
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 13 — Behind the dusty stools and the old towels, under the broken telephones and the picture frames, amid the spider webs, sits one of the country’s most important collections of artifacts devoted to the history of African-Americans.

Painstakingly collected over a lifetime by Mayme Agnew Clayton — a retired university librarian who died in October at 83 and whose interest in African-American history consumed her for most of her adult life — the massive collection of books, films, documents and other precious pieces of America’s past has remained essentially hidden for decades, most of it piled from floor to ceiling in a ramshackle garage behind Ms. Clayton’s home in the West Adams district of Los Angeles....

There are first editions by Langston Hughes and nearly every other writer from the Harlem Renaissance, many of them signed; a rare biography of the architect Paul R. Williams; and the oeuvre of the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. There is an edition of “The Negro’s Complaint,” a poem complete with hand-painted illustrations; books by and about every notable American of African descent from George Washington Carver to Bill Cosby; and thousands more items concerning those whose names were lost or never known.

Inspired By The Bible Experience: New Testament asin: 0310926319 binding: Audio CD list price: $49.99 USD amazon price: $31.49 USD

I’m going to review The Bible.

That’s what this is. It’s not a dramatization, it’s a dramatic reading of the New Testament, New International version. The list of performers is deep and broad, but I don’t think you’ll notice. They get into it but it is still, in the end, The Bible.

This particular bible ships on 19 CDs, all in a little wallet. The Old Testament will be out by Fall 2007. I understand why they published the New Testament first, but American Christianity is an Old Testament religion. Reward in exchange for humble forbearance. I think the Old Testament reading will be more dynamic.

I haven’t listened to the whole set yet, and there’s no branch of American Christianity I can think of that I will ever participate in. Those are the grains of salt you should keep handy as I explain why I think Christians, and American Christians in particular should have something like this.

Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America author: Peniel E. Joseph rating: asin: 0805075399 binding: Hardcover list price: $27.50 USD amazon price: $20.90 USD

Midnight documents the Black Power Movement as a shaping force of the Black communities. Densely populated with local activists that rarely get mentioned, supported by 45 pages of endnotes and 23 pages of bibliography, it's a solid first attempt at turning journalism into history.

So far (I'm not done with the book) the big surprise to me has been the extent to which Malcolm X acted outside the framework of the Nation of Islam. I can easily see all parties feeling they suffered the original injury.

This book has made me aware of the shortcoming of most histories that purport to focus on Black folks, which is that they don't. For the most part they describe ways in which Black folks intruded on mainstream society and how that intrusion was resolved. A history of the culture that developed under the weight of racism and the intrusions that had to be compensated for is an enlightening change. My own knowlege is mostly the result of the former type of Black History plus conversations with friends of friends, so there's a lot here that's new to me.

Mirror to America : The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin author: John Hope Franklin rating: asin: B000GQLCRS binding: Hardcover list price: $25.00 USD amazon price: $25.00

There are books you read, books you absorb and books you devour. Sitting in the ATL airport, several hours before my flight home, I started reading Dr. John Hope Franklin’s autobiography, Mirror to America.

I have never been so immediately hooked by someone else’s life. It is probably a good thing I hadn’t read this book before meeting Dr. Franklin. I’d have been as fanboy about him as I was with Dr. Bennett. There’s a clarity to his writing that I envy, the same directness that made The Shaping of Black America something I would to emulate.

I'm finding at least some of this first person stuff interesting.

2006 Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival
Saturday, August 19th, 4:30 PM
Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn

Click here for directions!

Drawing upon the rich and diverse literary history of Fort Greene Park and its surrounding neighborhoods, The Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival provides a means for self-expression and creativity for area young people, and builds community through arts and literature. The Lit Fest consists of a six-week series of free Saturday creative writing workshops for young people and an end-of-summer reading featuring literary icons reading alongside our young writers. The Lit Fest honors the power of the written word to build inclusiveness and give voice to the thoughts and experiences of everyone, not just the privileged and powerful.

The Lit Fest is a project of NY Writers Coalition, the Fort Greene Park Conservancy, Akashic Books and Griot Reading Programs, with additional support from The Walt Whitman Project and BOMB Magazine.

Sponsors include NYC Council Member Letitia James, Con Edison, Time Warner, Emmanuel Baptist Church, Independence Community Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Council through a grant received from the NY State Council For The Arts, Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation.

My American Life : From Rage to Entitlement author: Price Cobbs asin: 0743496191 binding: Hardcover list price: $24.95 USD amazon price: $24.95 USD

I don't generally read memoirs. I decided to review this one when I caught an appearance by Dr. Cobbs on C-SPAN's Book TV while flipping channels. I stopped to see what was up, and wasn't but so interested until he mentioned he co-authored Black Rage.

Read an excerpt from The Black Notebooks on Amazon.com

The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey author: Toi Derricotte,Toi Derricote asin: 0393319016

Active Liberty : Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution author: Stephen Breyer asin: 0307263134 binding: Hardcover list price: $24.95 USD amazon price: $18.21 USD

This book, by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, is a first pass at a progressive interpretation of the Constitution. at least I hope it's a first pass. I like the book, but truth is I wanted to like it more than I do.

Justice Breyer starts out by explaining what he wants to do in the book, which is to lay out what he refers to as a "theme," a thesis on the values that should be used as aids in interpreting the constitution. He actually takes something of an originalist stance; however, beyond restrictions on governmental power he also finds goads to direct what action is necessary.

Breyer's basic position is the Constitution's various provisions exist in order to defend against a domineering government and to enable active participation in government by the governed. The exposition of this position is concise and pretty solid. He takes some twenty pages to explain the theme, how it fits into judicial interpretative traditions and to explain why his thesis is "consistent with the Constitution's history."