It’s the story of pre-colonial Nigeria, groundbreaking because it was originally written in English by a black African writer. The title was taken from a William Butler Yeats poem. It features the story of Okonkwo, a young man struggling to maintain the old customs with the ones brought by white Christian missionaries. Gods and Soldiers, briefly reviewed Read More
I’ve been chomping at the bit to get to our discussion of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes, this month’s reading/discussion group pick. The book follows the efforts of Geoffrey Canada and his audacious Harlem Children’s Zone program, a formidable array of proactive social programs that Canada hopes will lift every child in Harlem into college Read More
Whatever It Takes is the story of Geoffrey Canada, the president and mastermind of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) an audacious social experiment that hopes to reduce poverty and raise education achievement in a 97-block area in Harlem. (Coincidentally, the program was mentioned today in a post here.) Paul Tough, the book’s author, reported on one Read More
*Note: We’re making this discussion a sticky post, and it’ll be at the top of the page all this week. Scroll down for newer posts. Benji, Reggie, Nick, Clive, Bobby, Randy, Marcus & NP (“Nigga Please”). Back when summers were idle, the coming of September meant reinvention and, in the meantime, there were a ton Read More
Your reading companion to Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor May’s book pick which we will be discussing on June 15th: “What are the origins of the strange compulsion that forces them to reach out to smooth, squeeze, pet, pat, bounce their fingers in the soft, resilient exuberance of an Afro, a natural, a just doin’ -its-own-thing Read More
Regrettably a long weekend has come and gone and, if you’re anything like me, the anticipation for all the wonderful “time off” in order to “take care of things” culminated in an uneventful weekend full of hair washing, reading, back-to-back viewings of Coming to America on Comedy Central, and the Pam Greer Blaxploitation marathon on Read More
I’ve already got my copy. You can find out more about Colson Whitehead here and look through some of his other titles here. We’ll be discussing this book on the 15th of June. We can save this for the discussion, but this is an early preview of a “new market,” for black folk. As an author at writeblack.com puts Read More
via. So you know that book discussion group thingie we started a couple months ago? It got off to a rollicking start with Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and then rapidly flamed out with Edwidge Danticat’s Brother I’m Dying. We weren’t alone in noticing the problem. belleisa, a regular reader, volunteered Read More
We’re a little a lot late putting this one up. Last month’s book focused on a family still feeling the reverberations of a violent dictatorship in the D.R. even as staked out new lives in the United States. universeexpanding suggested that our second book club pick should explore similar themes as they played out on Read More
You can join the discussion here, folks.
