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Baldwin's Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin Herb Boyd Atria, $24, 244pp. ISBN: 074329307X |
Perhaps no other writer is as synonymous with Harlem as James Baldwin (1924-1987). The events there that shaped his youth greatly influenced Baldwin's work, much of which focused on his experiences as a black man in white America. Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, and Giovanni's Room are just a few of his classic fiction and nonfiction books that remain an essential part of the American canon. In Baldwin's Harlem, award-winning journalist Herb Boyd combines impeccable biographical research with astute literary criticism, and reveals to readers Baldwin's association with Harlem on both metaphorical and realistic levels. For example, Boyd describes Baldwin's relationship with Harlem Renaissance poet laureate Countee Cullen, who taught Baldwin French in the ninth grade. Packed with telling anecdotes, Baldwin's Harlem illuminates the writer's diverse views and impressions of the community that would remain a consistent presence in virtually all of his writing. Baldwin's Harlem provides an intelligent and enlightening look at one of America's most important literary enclaves.
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Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Harriet A. Washington Harlem Moon, $15.95, 528pp. ISBN-13: 9780767915472 |
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Medical Aparthied is the first and only comprehensive history of the medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between Africans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the way both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without a hint of informed consent--a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It shows how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks and a view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government's Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, and private institutions. Medical Aparthied reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. Medical Aparthied was selected as a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
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Race Card: How Bluffing about Bias Makes Race Relations Worse Richard Thompson Ford Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, 400pp ISBN-13: 9780374245757 |
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What do Katrina victims waiting for federal disaster relief, millionaire rappers buying vintage champagne, Ivy League professors waiting for taxis, and ghetto hustlers trying to find steady work have in common? All have claimed to be victims of racism. These days almost no one openly expresses racist beliefs or defends bigoted motives. So lots of people are victims of bigotry, but no one’s a bigot? What gives? Either a lot of people are lying about their true beliefs and motivations, or a lot of people are jumping to unwarranted conclusions—or just playing the race card.
As the label of “prejudice” is applied to more and more situations, it loses a clear and agreed-upon meaning. This makes it easy for self-serving individuals and political hacks to use accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other types of “bias” to advance their own ends. Richard Thompson Ford, a Stanford Law School professor, brings sophisticated legal analysis, lively and eye-popping anecdotes, and plain old common sense to this heated topic. He offers ways to separate valid claims from bellyaching. Daring, entertaining, and incisive, The Race Card is a call for us to treat racism as a social problem that must be objectively understood and honestly evaluated.
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Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations Charles P. Henry NYU Press, $29.95, 272pp ISBN-13: 9780814736920 |
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Ever since the unfulfilled promise of "forty acres and a mule," American has consistently failed to compensate black Americans for the wrongs of slavery. Long Overdue provides a history of the racial reparations movement and shows why it is an idea whose time has come. Martin Luther King, Jr., remarked in his 'I Have a Dream' speech that America has given Black citizens a bad check marked insufficient funds. Yet apart from a few Black nationalists, the call for reparations has been peripheral to Black policy demands. Charles P. Henry examines Americans unwillingness to confront this economic injustice, and crafts a skillful moral, political, economic, and historical argument for African American reparations, focusing on successful political cases. In the wake of recent successes in South Africa and New Zealand, new models for reparations have recently found traction in a number of American cities and states, from Dallas to Baltimore and Virginia to California. By looking at other dispossessed group — Native Americans, holocaust survivors, and Japanese internment victims in the 1940s — Henry shows how some groups have won the fight for reparations. As Hurricane Katrina made apparent, the legacy of racial segregation and economic disadvantage is never far below the surface in America. Long Overdue provides an up-to-date survey of the political and legislative efforts that are now breaking the surface to move reparations into the heart of our national discussion about race.
RECENTLY RELEASED NONFICTION |
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