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Showing posts with the label African Americans

MARCH: BOOK ONE (graphic novel) by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin

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Published in 2013 by Top Shelf Productions. Written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin. Illustrated by Nate Powell. Winner: National Book Award Winner: Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Winner: Coretta Scott King Book Award Winner: ALA Notable Books Winner: Reader's Digest Graphic Novels Every Grown-Up Should Read Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020) tells his life story in this graphic novel, focusing on his struggles in the Civil Rights Movement. This is the first book in a trilogy, covering the first 20 years of his life. Lewis is interested in three things as a young man - education, preaching, and the Civil Rights movement. Lewis listens to the traditional African American leaders and he hears talk of moderation (or, even worse, nothing at all about Civil Rights.) He doesn't know what to do, but he knows this is not the way forward.  Lewis's growing frustration and the moment when Lewis hears MLK . One day, he hears Martin Luther King, Jr. speak over the radio and he knows t

BASS REEVES: TALES of the TALENTED TENTH, no. 1 by Joel Christian Gill

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 Published by Fulcrum Publishing in 2014. Artist and author Joel Christian Gill is writing and illustrating a series of graphic novels that look into the lives of lesser known, exceptional African Americans. His inspiration is this quote from W.E.B. DuBois: "The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground." In other words, some will rise up and inspire/lead the rest. This is Gill's way of providing inspiration. Bass Reeves was a legendary lawman in the Old West. He was a Deputy U.S. Marshal that chased down bad guys who would flee into Indian Territory (Oklahoma and Kansas) to hide from law enforcement in the neighboring states. If you've seen either of the two versions of the movie True Grit, that is the exact situation. The character Rooster Cogburn would have been real-life Bass Reeves' co-worker if Cogburn were a real person. The graphic novel tells about Reeves' childhood as a slave in Arkansas, how he escaped durin

YOU SHOULD SEE ME in a CROWN (audiobook) by Leah Johnson

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  Published in 2020 by Scholastic Audio. Read by Alaska Jackson. Duration: 7 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: High School senior Liz Lighty is depending on a $10,000 music scholarship to be able to afford to attend the college she has always wanted to go to.  When she discovers that she doesn't get the scholarship, she's afraid her grandparents will sell their house to pay for her college. Her high school offers a $10,000 scholarship for the winner of the Prom Queen competition. Enthusiastic band member Liz, supported by her outsider group of friends, joins the competition against all cheerleaders, legacies, and the beautiful people... My Review: In a lot of ways, this is a typical high school ugly duckling story - the underdog great kid goes up against the popular clique. But, there are some additional nuances that make this more interesting.  The book is set in the Indianapolis area (Indianapolis is my adopted hometown) and the high school in the book (Campbell) is a

SLAVERY, RESISTANCE, FREEDOM (Gettysburg Civil War Institute Books collection) edited by Gabor Boritt and Scott Hancock.

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  Published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. The book consists of six essays about the experience of African Americans from the early American period through Reconstruction.  They are arranged in chronological order and, as is the way with all collections, of varying quality. I did not enjoy either of the two essays by one of the editors, Scott Hancock. I did enjoy reading two of them quite a bit. There are two strong essays that read more like small chapters from a Civil War history  about the United States Colored Troops (USCT) - the segregated units of black soldiers led by white officers.  The last essay was by Reconstruction expert Eric Foner. It was a bit tedious to read, but it ruthlessly lays to rest that old Confederate and neo-Confederate lie that Black Reconstruction (when Blacks could actually vote and the old leaders of the Confederacy were not allowed to run for office) just elected illiterate field hands to the highest offices. The men Foner describes were mostly (80%

THANK YOU for VOTING: THE MADDENING, ENLIGHTENING, INSPIRING TRUTH ABOUT VOTING in AMERICA (audiobook) by Erin Geiger Smith

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  Published in 2020 bt Harper Audio. Read by Lisa Cordileone. Duration: 6 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. As the title says, his book is intended to be a primer on the history of elections in America and how elections work now in different states. It was thorough enough without drowning the listener in details. The book does a solid job with both of those major topics without feeling partisan. Those topics comprise the first and last two hours of this audiobook. The middle two hours just felt like padding. There was an extended discussion of how to raise the voter participation rate that just dragged with discussions of how businesses can encourage employees to vote, ad campaigns from local government, and so on.  I would rate the first two sections 4 stars out of 5, but the middle section is a 2 out of 5 at best. That makes a final score of 3 out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THANK YOU for VOTING: THE MADDENING, ENLIGHTENING, INSPIRING TRUTH ABOUT VOTING in AMERICA (

AMERICAN REBOOT: AN IDEALIST'S GUIDE TO GETTING BIG THINGS DONE (audiobook) by Will Hurd

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  Published in March of 2022 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, Will Hurd. Duration: 8 hours, 47 minutes. Unabridged. Will Hurd has done a lot of things in his 45 years. He has been an operations analyst for the CIA (working in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan), he was worked in high-tech (including cyber-security and artificial intelligence), has served 6 years as a member of the House of Representatives from Texas, and is now a Republican candidate for President in 2024. This book was undoubtedly an attempt to introduce Will Hurd to a larger audience. I follow politics pretty well and I had never heard of Will Hurd until he announced his campaign for President in June of 2023 (to be fair, there are 535 members of Congress and most are not well known outside of their districts.) I heard about this book in a political podcast and, lo and behold, it turns out that my library had it. Just to let you know where I am coming from as I review this book, I am a Never Trump Repub

WHEN WE'RE HOME in AFRICA (audiobook) by Themba Umbalisi

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Published in 2021 by Next Chapter Audio LTD. Read by Crawford B. Bunkley III. Duration: 4 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. I have no idea where I found this book. I think it was a freebie on Audible through Amazon's Prime Reading program. I know that I got it because I am a big reader of Civil War histories and fiction and this sounded like it was right up my alley. Synopsis: The description of this book is accurate, to a point. It is about a freed slave who joins the Union Army and then goes from job to job and place to place with a goal of settling in Africa. My Review: This book is basically a Forrest Gump type of story - one man goes on an epic journey and ends up going through a lot of the historical movements of the era. Warning: Lots of *********SPOILERS********all the way to the end of this review. This audiobook comes in at almost exactly 50% of the run time for FORREST GUMP   and covers maybe even more territory. Our hero (his name changes multiple times) begins as a slave

WHITE EVANGELICAL RACISM: THE POLITICS of MORALITY in AMERICA (audiobook) by Anthea Butler

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  Published by Tantor Audio in 2021. Read by Allyson Johnson. Duration: 3 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. This book takes a short look at how the people that refer to themselves as Evangelicals and their forebears have dealt with race over time. An interracial marriage protest. The signs claim that interracial marriage is Communist and a sign of the anti-Christ. The book starts with the justifications that religious leaders used to defend slavery. After the Civil War, they modified those justifications slightly to defend the Jim Crow system. Butler contends that the Evangelical movements in the 1900's were worried about things like Communism, but it usually had a racial overtone to it - like when Martin Luther King was accused of spreading Communism to Black communities all over the country when he was just asking for the rights that White Americans already had. The heart of her book is about Billy Graham and what she calls out as a wishy-washy approach to racism. I am a bit more fo

THE FALSE CAUSE: FRAUD, FABRICATION, and WHITE SUPREMACY in CONFEDERATE MEMORY (audiobook) by Adam H. Domby

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  Published by Blackstone Publishing in 2022. Read by Jack de Golia. Duration: 8 hours, 58 minutes. Unabridged. The cover of the book and the short description offered by my library app gives the impression that this book is pretty much about the "Silent Sam" Confederate memorial that stood at the University of North Carolina from 1913-2018. This book is much more than that, though. It uses Silent Sam as an entry point into a larger discussion of how North Carolina chose to remember how it performed in the Civil War (more than 10% of Civil War soldiers from North Carolina actually fought for the Union.) He also discusses how White men lied about their service to get Confederate pensions and the government turned a blind eye in the name affirming White unity and White Supremacy. Whites that fought for the Union (but couldn't qualify for a Union pension) or actively fought the Confederate draft with violence or by simply going AWOL at every point possible were given pension

THE REST I WILL KILL: WILLIAM TILLMAN and the UNFORGETTABLE STORY of HOW a FREE BLACK MAN REFUSED to BECOME a SLAVE (audiobook) by Brian McGinty

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  Published by HighBridge in 2016. Read by Sean Crisden. Duration: 4 hours, 19 minutes. Unabridged. At the beginning of the Civil War, the Confederacy authorized ships to be privateers. Privateers are basically pirates with the explicit backing of a government. The idea was to authorize as many ships as possible to attack Union shipping as part of the Confederate war effort.  William Tillman (c. 1834-?) One of the early victims of these attacks was the S.J. Waring , a ship out of New York City bound for South America. On July 4, 1861 the ship was attacked, captured, and most of the crew was taken off the Waring to the privateer ship but they did leave a few people behind, including the ship's cook - a free black man named William Tillman.  The privateers made it very clear that they were going to sell Tillman in the slave market in Charleston and Tillman was not going to let that happen... Unfortunately, there just isn't a lot of information about William Tillman - either befo

TALKING BACK, TALKING BLACK: TRUTHS ABOUT AMERICA'S LINGUA FRANCA (audiobook) by John McWhorter

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  Published in 2019 by HighBridge. Read by the author, John McWhorter. Duration: 4 hours, 19 minutes. Unabridged. John McWhorter is, perhaps, the best known linguist in America (after Noam Chomsky). He has written about general rules of how languages over long periods of time, the evolution of English, the history behind English's biggest and baddest curse words, and more. Although he speaks in a formal tone, he has a knack for explaining fairly complicated things with everyday English and with lots of easy to follow examples. The author and reader, John McWhorter In this book, the topic is what is commonly known as Black English.  Many people think of Black English as simply "bad" or "slang" English - English with less verb conjugations, double negatives and the endings left off of lots of words. McWhorter demonstrates that Black English isn't just random mispronunciations and made up words. Instead, it is a coherent system that has its own distinct grammar

NO COMMON GROUND: CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS and the ONGOING FIGHT for RACIAL JUSTICE (audiobook) by Karen L. Cox

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Published in 2021 by Tantor Audio. Read by David Sadzin. Duration: 6 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged. At it's core, this book is a history of Confederate monuments and what they mean(t) to all of the people who live and work around them. These monuments are tied in with the "Lost Cause" view of history that teaches that the Confederate cause was a just one, that the war had nothing to do with slavery and that the Confederate cause is only suppressed, but not dead. These monuments are a vivid reminder about the "not dead" part. When the first big waves of monuments were out up (late 1800's) the Jim Crow laws were becoming standardized. During this time period, the Supreme Court decided in favor of racial segregation in the case Plessy v Ferguson (1896) and that project continued in earnest throughout the South.  The monuments did honor the Confederate veterans, but they were also placed in symbolic areas like courthouses and town squares told African-Americans

THIS REPUBLIC of SUFFERING: DEATH and the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (audiobook) by Drew Gilpin Faust

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Published by Blackstone Audio in 2008. Read by Lorna Raver. Duration: 10 hours, 54 minutes. Unabridged. This unique Civil War history isn't driven by the timeline of the Civil War, the strategies, or the personalities. Instead, it is a look at how the soldiers, the government, the families on the home front and post-war politics were affected by the massive amount of death that the war created as it ground on. In all previous wars, the U.S. government did not worry too much about how to bury the dead because there just weren't that many when compared to the Civil War. Soldiers were properly buried, but there wasn't much thought given to keeping records about where they were buried, marking their graves or even keeping track of who had died. The sheer quantity of death in the Civil War made the government change its approach.  The book starts with a look at how dying a glorious death was all everyone wrote about. But, once the reality of the war was apparent, the talk shifte

STRENGTH for the FIGHT: THE LIFE and FAITH of JACKIE ROBINSON (Library of Religious Biography) (audiobook) by Gary Scott Smith

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  Published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company in October of 2022. Read by Shamaan Casey. Duration: 10 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. Jackie Robinson.  He is an icon of sports. And politics. And American history. All fans of baseball know at least the broad strokes of the story of Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) and how he integrated baseball. This book offers a detailed re-telling of that story with a twist - a look at how Jackie Robinson's faith led him to this path and helped sustain him. Robinson's early life, his time in service during World War II and his college sports career and his relationship with his wife are all covered. The biggest single part of the book is, appropriately, the story of how he and Branch Rickey (the head of the Brooklyn Dodgers) worked together to integrate Major League Baseball in 1947. The book also looks at how Rickey's faith led him to act to make the world a more just place by acting in such a symbolic manner. Jackie Robinson stealing hom

THE FIRE NEXT TIME (audiobook) by James Baldwin

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  Published in 2008 by Blackstone Audio. Originally published in 1963. Read by Jesse L. Martin. Duration: 2 hours, 45 minutes. Unabridged. James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an African-American essayist, playwright, poet and novelist. This book is a collection of two lengthy essays on race and religion in the United States. The book comes from a line from the song Mary Don't You Weep : God gave Noah the rainbow sign No more water, the fire next time. The first essay is in the format of a letter to his nephew entitled " My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation ."  As suggested by the title, it is about America's ugly racial history, including incidents from Baldwin's life. The second, longer essay is " Down at the Cross: A Region in my Mind. " This is a discussion of religion in America, including how Christianity had been warped into a tool to prop up a social structure that kept whites on top and blacks on th

LETTERS to MY WHITE MALE FRIENDS by Dax-Devlon Ross

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  Published by Macmillan Audio in 2021. Read by the author, Dax-Devlon Ross. Duration: 5 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Dax-Devlon Ross makes a simple observation that it is entirely possible to participate in a racist system and not be racist. Not only is it possible, it is quite common. A person can participate in a system that looks fair on the surface, but somehow always results in the same kinds of people and the same kinds of people at the bottom.  He notes that this is not a particularly popular idea among white Americans, especially white male Americans. But, he also noted that the death of George Floyd caused a lot of white people to reconsider what they thought they knew.  This book offers an explanation of structural racism and gives concrete examples from the author's life and recent American history and offers some suggestions as to how to identify structural racism and break it up. That is good. On the other hand, there is some Human Resources jargon that I had to look

THE FLAG, the CROSS, and the STATION WAGON: A GRAYING AMERICAN LOOKS BACK at HIS SUBURBAN BOYHOOD and WONDERS WHAT the HELL HAPPENED (audiobook) by Bill McKibben

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  Published in 2022 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Eric Jason Martin. Duration: 6 hours, 39 minutes. Unabridged. McKibben looks back at his life in the suburbs in the 1960s and the 1970s and modern America and compares the two, In certain circles this is an invitation to complain about the modern world with comments like, "When I was a kid, we didn't have all of this blah, blah, blah foolishness." This is not that sort of book. McKibben looks at three general areas: Bill McKibben in 2016 (photo by Gage Skidmore) 1) The way that history was taught and the ways that he perceived that his country acted ("The Flag"). He grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts and was a tour guide as a young man for tourists who came to celebrate the bicentennial in 1976. The more he has learned, the more he knows that he was taught a simplistic, feel-good version of American history in school; 2) The things that his church taught him and how churches have fared over the intervening years (

RUBY BRIDGES GOES to SCHOOL: MY TRUE STORY by Ruby Bridges

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  Originally published in 2009. In 1960, a six year old little girl named Ruby Bridges was to be the first African-American student to integrate an elementary school in Louisiana. To say it did not go well would be an understatement. Parents pulled their children out. So many pulled their children out that Ruby was in a class by herself at first. There were so screaming, protesting mobs of parents. There were threats of violence. It was so bad that federal marshals were sent in to ensure her safety and to ensure that the desegregation order was enforced. ********** This book was written by Ruby Bridges and is published by Scholastic as a Level 2 early reader. That is pretty early for a student to read about this topic - Ruby Bridges was the same age as the children who would be reading this book. I normally don't review books for little children, but I decided to review this one when I saw that a group called Moms for Liberty called for it to be removed from a a school system in Te

OUR FIRST CIVIL WAR: PATRIOTS and LOYALISTS in the AMERICAN REVOLUTION (audiobook) by H.W. Brand

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  Published by Random House Audio in November of 2021. Read by Steve Hendrickson. Duration: 16 hours, 31 minutes. Unabridged. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) and William Franklin (1730-1813) When I read the title of this audiobook, I was sure that I was going to be listening to an in-depth look at how the population of the young United States dealt with its neighbors and family that disagreed about the question of independence. The most famous example is Benjamin Franklin and his son William Franklin. William Franklin was the last royal governor of New Jersey and their relationship never recovered from the shock of the Revolutionary War.  This book deals with more of these issues than most histories of the Revolutionary War era, but that is not particularly hard to do - most of them mention the Franklin family situation and use it as a stand-in for all families. But, it does not go in-depth into this concept of Loyalists vs. Patriots. For example, I learned more about this topic from thi