Harlem Lost and Found
by Michael Henry Adams

For years the Harlem historian Michael Henry Adams has been a frequent critic of how preservation is practiced in New York City. Now his new book, "Harlem Lost and Found," presents a rich account of Harlem history, both black and white.

Born in 1956 in Akron, Ohio, Mr. Adams wanted to go to Yale, but family finances required that he attend the University of Akron. He majored in painting, drawing and art history and soon got work on architectural surveys of buildings in Cleveland and Akron, seeing first hand how politics sometimes affects supposedly neutral preservation studies. In Akron "all the most important, most endangered buildings, they instructed us not to list," he said.

He came to New York in 1985 for the graduate program in architectural preservation at Columbia University. For those without an architectural degree, the program often leads to jobs at government agencies or with traditional preservation groups, but Mr. Adams gradually developed an independent career in writing, research and preservation activity involving 19th-century architectural history. He became particularly interested in Harlem, which was built mostly by whites but evolved as a black center of population in the 1910's.

Mr. Adams's 280-page book is illustrated with historic black and white photographs and with modern color images by Paul Rocheleau. It begins with the mansions of the Colonial period and goes up to 1915, just as black migration was profoundly changing Harlem.

He covers various periods of the row houses, small apartment buildings and churches that typify Harlem, presenting them in terms of long-forgotten neighborhood boundaries — Minniesland, Carmansville, Audubon Park — and also immigrant groups, such as Finns and Jews. His extensive photographic research makes the book far richer than the usual work on Harlem with the standard pictures.

The geographically narrow scope of "Harlem Lost and Found" permits Mr. Adams to discuss the traditional Harlem landmarks, like Strivers Row (West 138th and 139th Streets between Frederick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevards), but also address the hundreds of lesser buildings, some standing, some demolished, that formed the area. These range from the unusual stone, shingle and brick houses at 729 and 731 St. Nicholas Avenue (near 146th Street) of 1886 to the deliciously ornamented six-story Jumel apartment house of 1901 at 505 West 142nd Street.

"Harlem Lost and Found" ends its discussion of buildings in the 1910's and so omits most of the African-American contribution to Harlem's architecture, which generally came later. But there is a final chapter, "The Evolution of a Community," that forms the "Found" section of the book. There, he traces the development of black migration to Harlem and retraces his steps through many of the historic buildings he wrote about earlier, this time including their current occupants and furnishings, in color photographs. He shows not only the intact paneling and other architectural details of the houses but also the African-American art, modern and period furniture and personal collections that give these houses a new life.

It's an interesting and refreshing look at Harlem from a totally different perspective.
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Our Separate Ways: Black and White Woman and the Struggle for Professional Identity

Ella L. J. Edmondson Bell, Stella M. Nkomo

In Our Separate Ways, authors Ella Bell and Stella Nkomo take an unflinching look at the surprising differences between black and white women's trials and triumphs on their way up the executive ladder. Based on groundbreaking research that spanned eight years, Our Separate Ways compares and contrasts the experiences of 120 black and white female managers in the American business arena. In-depth histories bring to life the women's powerful and often difficult journeys from childhood to professional success, highlighting the roles that gender, race, and class played in their development.

Although successful professional women come from widely diverse family backgrounds, educational experiences, and community values, they share a common assumption upon entering the workforce: "I have a chance." Along the way, however, they discover that people question their authority, challenge their intelligence, and discount their ideas. And while gender is a common denominator among these women, race and class are often wedges between them.

Because "black women executives remain a mystery to others in their organizations," Bell and Nkomo focus on the individual stories and personal experiences of 14 women. These poignant narratives highlight six "significant flashpoints" in the women's journeys: breaking into management, adjusting to the corporate environment, encountering barriers, overcoming barriers, making change in the work environment, and coming to terms with personal life choices.

In Our Separate Ways, you will find candid discussions about stereotypes, learn how black women's early experiences affect their attitudes in the business world, become aware of how white women have-perhaps unwittingly-aligned themselves more often with white men than with black women, and see ways that our country continues to come to terms with diversity in all of its dimensions.

An epilogue "offers suggestions on how to begin the sometimes difficult dialogue between black and white women executives. Bell and Nkomo have provided a well-researched and thought-provoking look at some important aspects of race and gender in corporate America.

Whether you are a human resources director wondering why you're having trouble retaining black women, a white female manager considering the role of race in your office, or a black female manager searching for perspective, you will find fresh insights about how black and white women's struggles differ and encounter provocative ideas for creating a better workplace environment for everyone.

No Free Lunch
Rodney Carroll

“Everyone who is successful, regardless of age, race, or ethnicity, at some point in their lives received an opportunity. Someone believed in them enough to give them a chance.” These are the words of Rodney Carroll, one of America’s most innovative minds and a leading architect of the welfare to work movement. They encapsulate his inspiring memoir, No Free Lunch, the story of a man who rose to the top–and returned to bring millions of people along with him.

Raised in an area both economically and emotionally depressed, Rodney and his siblings were forced onto welfare after Rodney’s alcoholic and abusive mother was declared unfit to raise her children. Though lured by gangs that aimed to “draft” him into their midst, he clung instead to his wise and loving grandmother and his innate desire to “make a difference.” A part-time job as a truck loader for UPS would change Rodney’s life forever–and eventually change the lives of others who were looking for a chance to work.

By improving the efficiency of others at UPS, Rodney was rewarded with promotions. By balancing his successes and setbacks, applauding others’ accomplishments, and disciplining not humiliating, he learned how to manage men and women, lead departments, and, at last, to lift up others who started out as humbly as he had.

Putting his own job on the line, Rodney created a program to employ welfare recipients at UPS–a plan that would become a model for others across the country. Initially derided by others as “those people,” these new workers responded to Rodney’s faith in them, and their new self-esteem led to new self-sufficiency.

Written with vigor and humor, No Free Lunch is a testament to one man’s tenacity and compassion, a sweeping story that starts in a slum and ends on a stage shared with President Clinton, a stirring book about one American’s fight for the independence of millions.

Bad Boy Brawly Brown
An Easy Rollins Mystery
By Walter Mosley
Little Brown and Company

Finally. Five years after the last taste (1997's Gone Fishin') and six years after the last full meal (1996's A Little Yellow Dog), Easy Rawlins makes a very welcome return. Now 44 years old, Easy no longer makes a living from doing people "favors." Now he owns a house, works for the Board of Education in Los Angeles and is father to a teenage son, Jesus, and a young daughter, Feather.

The year is 1964, and though Easy seems settled into honest work as a Los Angeles custodian, he's having other problems--notably, his adopted son's wish to quit school and lingering remorse over the death (in A Little Yellow Dog) of his homicidal crony, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander. Yet he remains willing to do "favors" for folks in need.

Teenager Brawly Brown the son of Alva, the girlfriend of Easy's friend, John has left home and is running with the radical Urban Revolutionary Party. Friendship and loyalty being still sacred to Easy, he agrees, as a favor, to try to locate and talk to Brawly. As usual, Easy's path is not easy. When a body surfaces, Easy finds himself in the middle of a vicious puzzle where lives are cheap and death the easiest solution.

As always, Mosley illuminates time and place with a precision few writers can match whatever genre they choose. The author continues to probe the African American experience, and while crime is at the heart of this book, its soul lies in deeper issues, specifically, the civil rights issues of the early 60's. He also delivers a rousing good story and continues to captivate with characters readers have grown to love, including the now "dead" Mouse, who still plays an important role in Easy's chronicle.

Mosley is always a good read. Recommended.

Tenderheaded : A Comb-Bending Collection of Hair Stories
by Edited by Juliette Harris and Pamela Johnson

Ranging from the shaving of newborns to the coiffing of the dead, this remarkable array of writings and images illuminates black women's hair and its cultural meaning.

Embracing all types of hair whether it's relaxed, worn in an Afro, has extensions woven in, is twisted into dreads or shaven off altogether, the authors urge readers to respond to their own particular hair without judgment and to view it as an essential part of their personal space. In poems, essays, cartoons, photos, and excerpts from novels and plays, women and men speak to the meaning hair has for them, and for society.

While entries from famous authors such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Lucille Clifton and Toni Morrison are often excerpted from previously published works, they gain new dimensions in this context. Yet it's the less well-known contributors who steal the show.

Halima Taha, now a Muslim who covers her head, recalls being shunned as a teenager when she got her first Afro. Annabelle Baker explains how her undergraduate career at Hampton College in the 1940s was cut short the day she decided not to process her hair anymore. Yvonne Durant glorifies her grey hair, noting that it seems to have "upped" her I.Q. considerably "at least that's how I'm treated."

The issue driving the alternately provocative, comic, and empowering writings in this unprecedented work is not merely about looking good, but about feeling adequate in a society where the beauty standards are unobtainable for most women. Tenderheaded boldly throws open the closet where black women's skeletons have been threatening to burst down the door.

Beyond the variety of contributors and the provocative quotes and historical tidbits sprinkled between the entries, it's the wealth of feeling rooted in hair that makes this volume so compelling.

Growing Up X
IIyasah Shabazz

In her mind, 's father is a montage of blurry, black and white photographs and grainy newsreel. She did not know the man that some called a savior and some called a devil. She did not know the sound of his voice, the feel of his hair, the look of his hands. To find him for herself, she has to navigate through other people's memories. She must try to locate her family's truth in the shifting albums of history.

Now Shabazz, who was 2 when her father, Malcolm X, was assassinated more than 37 years ago, is offering her stories to the world in an intimate look inside her family. Her memoir, "Growing Up X" (One World Books), picks up the family's story where history books and political analyses of the Muslim leader who preached black empowerment leave off. It is an up-close portrait of the house full of girls to whom the larger-than-life activist came home each night: the family that basked in his light when he lived, the family that struggled, often alone, when he was gone. In many ways, their struggle continues today.

Shabazz, 39, said she wrote the book partly hoping it would inspire others who are struggling with life challenges. But she also called it "therapeutic" to revisit the events of her life--and, in particular, to try to make her peace with the expectations that she has faced for as long as she can remember.

"The expectation is the burden--the burden! Here you have great parents, and now you're expected to be better than, or to be them!" she said. "It's awful, it is awful. It just tears you up inside."

She has finally learned, she said, that she "cannot save the world. Just let it go, let it go."

The book's cover photograph depicts an image at once commonplace and incongruous--Shabazz as a toddler held affectionately in the arms of the man the FBI, the CIA and, eventually, the Nation of Islam reviled. She wears a baby bonnet; he sports his trademark goatee and horn-rimmed glasses.

"Growing Up X" tells of a childhood that was simultaneously average--she and her five sisters attended private schools in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., and square-danced at summer camp in Vermont--and unique--at age 9, she began challenging teachers on the facts of black history and, as a college student, she absorbed her classmates' harsh judgments because she was not a political activist.

As hinted at in the family's public scuffle in recent weeks over the threatened auction of Malcolm X's personal papers, Shabazz's story reflects the ongoing, personal reverberations of one man's political journey and his violent death. It is a story of perseverance in the wake of bitter loss.

The book, which relies on the accounts of family friends to fill in details Shabazz was too young to remember, reflects the burdens, confusions and joys that often befall the children of famous people. But Shabazz's story has an added dimension in that, unlike the child of a film star or sports champion, she must negotiate the volatile terrain of racial politics.

For much of his political career, Malcolm X, who later took the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, vilified American culture and values and promoted the separation of blacks and whites because, he said, whites were incapable of living equally with blacks. In the last years of his life, however, having made a religious pilgrimage abroad and observing people of all colors living harmoniously, his attitudes shifted. He increasingly stressed black empowerment and the common bonds of all races.

"I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red," Malcolm X told an interviewer a month before he was killed, according to "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," which he wrote with Alex Haley.

A few weeks ago, Shabazz unveiled her book at a reception in Harlem. Despite the swank environment complete with jazz band and hovering waiters, the scene had the echoes of grim history: Shabazz has lived as long as her father did--he was 39 when he died--and the book event was held at the Audubon Ballroom, where he spoke his last words.

"Malcolm was killed right about ... here," said Manning Marable, a historian at Columbia University, gesturing in the direction of the jazz band. "There was a stage here. He was standing, speaking. They came in from over there," he said, indicating the room's only entrance 65 feet away. The men scuffled and yelled to distract from the gunmen who shot him 14 times. (Two Nation of Islam members served prison time for the murder.)

Shabazz, a tall woman with mahogany skin, her father's square jaw and a fashion model's presence (she once was one), stood before a massive mural depicting her father's life and, in her deep, smoky voice, told the crowd of about 300, "Coming to the Audubon, there was so much beautiful energy here. I felt so much peace."

After the event, she said the place "doesn't have negative meaning for me. My father gave his life for a cause. I can't live [thinking], 'Why me? Why us? Why did he have to go?' The bottom line is this is what's happened. So how do we live, how do we grow? What's the purpose, what's the point of it all?"

Although she grew up much like a typical suburban child, life after her father's assassination was, Shabazz writes, in many ways excruciating. A year before his death, Malcolm had split rancorously with the Nation of Islam. A week before the killing, the family's house had been firebombed. When he died, the family had no home and no support from the religious community they had relied on for years. Malcolm had $600 in his bank account.

"The New York Times," Shabazz writes, "editorialized him as 'a twisted man' who turned 'true gifts to evil purpose.'" When a prominent friend helped them find a home in suburban Mount Vernon, N.Y., many in the conservative, black middle-class community clearly did not want them living down the street. Shabazz, who works as public information officer for the city of Mount Vernon, rarely tells new acquaintances who her father was. Each of the Shabazz daughters--including Attallah, Qubilah and Gamilah and twins Malikah and Malaak--joined local social organizations and attended college. Today, some, including Ilyasah, have advanced degrees.

Shabazz's book sometimes reads more like a loving memorial to her mother than anything else. Indeed, though she had some prominent benefactors such as Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and Sidney Poitier, the late Betty Shabazz managed the seemingly unmanageable, raising six girls and getting her PhD at the same time. She became a professor and college administrator and was long a revered activist in and around New York. Shabazz says her mother insulated her family from the world, including the media.

But she never discussed the assassination--the facts of the day or her feelings--and she did not seem to encourage her children to reflect on their feelings about it. There were no therapy sessions, no books on death and grieving. Betty Shabazz spoke reverently of her late husband--in the present tense. "Malcolm says ... " and "Malcolm thinks...."

So, although pictures of Malcolm filled the house and the "Autobiography" was a constant presence, the girls' upbringing seemed to have been marked by a persistent silence and, beneath that, unresolved grief. That silence prompted Shabazz, once in college, to read the "Autobiography," visit her father's grave for the first time and take a course on him.

It was at once a difficult and exhilarating experience for her, Shabazz said. "It was this professor," she wrote, "who helped me really understand my father's philosophy and his enormous contributions to our people and to humankind." When the professor, who did not reveal Shabazz's identity to the class, asked who among them would be ready for the revolution, she wrote, "all hands shot up, as did mine."

"Imagine how [that history] impacted her and the rest of them," said Terrie Williams, a lifelong family friend and founder of the New York-based Stay Strong Foundation for troubled youth. "It's extraordinary that this woman was able to get this story out, because this family is in a lot of pain."

That pain erupted again in 1995 when second-oldest daughter Qubilah Shabazz was arrested on charges of plotting to kill Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan because she believed he played a role in the death of her father. (Farrakhan, once a protégé of Malcolm's, has never been linked to the killing.) Charges were dropped when she agreed to counseling and substance-abuse treatment.

Two years later, Qubilah's troubled son, Malcolm, then 12, unhappy that he had been sent to live with his grandmother in New York, set fire to Betty Shabazz's home while she slept. The matriarch suffered burns over 80% of her body and died three weeks later. Malcolm pleaded guilty to the juvenile equivalent of second-degree manslaughter and second-degree arson and was in detention until recently. Now 17, he still struggles with behavior problems but has completed high school and lives with Ilyasah in New York, she said.

More recently, the family, though intensely media-shy, has been in the news again, this time in connection with the handling of their father's papers--including historically valuable diaries, speeches and letters to his wife.

News reports indicated that Malikah Shabazz, unbeknownst to her sisters, took the papers when she moved from the family's Mount Vernon home to Florida in 1999. She stored them in a rented locker but fell behind on the rent payments, and the papers were sold. The family became aware that the papers were missing when an auction house in San Francisco publicized the upcoming sale. (Butterfields canceled the sale after receiving a letter from the family's attorney that raised questions about the chain of ownership of the documents. The auction house arranged the transfer of the papers to the Schomburg Institute, a branch of the New York Public Library dedicated to African American research.)

The family now is working with Marable, a Malcolm X scholar and director of Columbia's Institute for Research in African-American Studies, on a project that will archive and annotate the facts of Malcolm's life. They are also working to launch a historical center at the Audubon Ballroom, which Shabazz said she hopes will be in operation before the end of the year.

The sisters don't seem to be close. They live in various states throughout the country, with Attallah on the West Coast. Though Shabazz admits tension arose among them over the handling of her mother's medical care after the fire, she recently said tersely, "Everyone is fine."

Through her family's turmoil, past and present, Ilyasah Shabazz has recovered and, in many ways, flourished. She is now working on a book about her parents' relationship, due out next year.

As her mother often instructed, Shabazz has found a way to "find the good, and praise it."

A Song Flung Up to Heaven
by Maya Angelou
Random House

Only Maya Angelou can write about loss and make it uplifting. She proved it with the very first volume of her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1958), and she achieves it again with her sixth and last volume of memoirs, A Song Flung Up to Heaven.

In this new book, Dr. Angelou recalls bidding a painful goodbye to Ghana, the country she loved, and to a man she loved there, returning to a much-changed United States. "The year was 1964," Angelou writes. "The cry of 'burn, baby, burn' was loud in the land, and black people had gone from the earlier mode of 'sit-in' to 'set fire,' and from 'march-in' to 'break-in.'"

No sooner did she land in San Francisco than her friend Malcolm X was shot and killed. The riots at Watts followed. So did the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Her hopes and idealism shattered, Angelou felt each loss like a blow to the heart.

"I was blitheringly innocent until I was about 35," she said in a recent interview. "I seem to have had the scales pulled off my eyes, and I decided I didn't like that. What I have done, what most of us do, is contrive an innocence. I contrived an innocence that kept me and keeps me quite young. However just behind that façade there is a knowing. By the time Dr. King was killed, I came to understand a lot of things. I learned I could handle myself. I learned a lot about my own inner strength. I learned that I was greatly loved."

The love of family and friends like author James Baldwin sustained her. "Agape love, the power of it really was made clear to me. There's a statement Polonius makes in Hamlet when he's talking to his son, in that 'To thine own self be true' monologue -- 'Those friends thou has and their adoption tried/Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.' I didn't know how important that was until those rigorous, vigorous challenging years. I learned ah, that's what that means."

As she cast about deciding what to do with her life, Angelou put food on the table by singing in a Honolulu night club. Anyone familiar with the voice as warm and welcoming as a hearth fire can well imagine her as a singer, but Angelou decided it was too demanding a profession, requiring too much sacrifice. Why, then, did she decide to write?

"I love it, I love it, I love it," says Angelou, now a professor of American Studies at North Carolina's Wake Forest University. "I believe literature has the power, the ability to move men's and women's souls. The work is so tedious, but I love the feeling of putting together a few nouns, pronouns, adverbs, adjectives and rolling them together; I just do."

In A Song Flung Up to Heaven, the author credits James Baldwin and Random House editor Robert Loomis with giving her the courage to write her own story. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings launched Angelou, then 30, as an author and as a role model of strength, courage and dignity. It's been both a reward and a responsibility.

"It has its burden in that I'm careful about what I say. I don't go out a lot. I go to friends' houses and they come to mine, but I'm always a little edgy when people are too adoring," says the author. "I believe that quite often that person who is at your feet will change position. If the winds of fortune change, that person will be at the throat. So when someone says, you're the greatest, I say, ahhh, how kind, there's my taxi."

By baring all in her autobiographies, Angelou wants people to know, as she says, "You may encounter many defeats, but don't be defeated. It may even be necessary to encounter some defeats -- it makes you who you are and [helps you] know what you can take."

You couldn't exactly call Dr. Angelou defeated. Since 1964, she has been nominated for the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, a Tony and an Emmy. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature, the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album and over 30 honorary degrees. She wrote the poem "On the Pulse of Morning" for the Clinton presidential inauguration in 1993 and "A Brave and Startling Truth" for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in 1995. But she wants A Song Flung Up to Heaven to be the last volume of her autobiography, mostly because what she has done for the past 34 years is write. The book ends in 1968 with Angelou beginning I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

"I refuse to write about writing. I don't even know how to do that. I leave that to Marcel Proust," she says and laughs. "I will continue to write essays and of course poetry, but autobiography? This is a good place to end."

Take a Lesson: Today's Black Achievers on How They Made It and What They Learned Along the Way
by Carolin Clarke

Lloyd Ward, the chief executive officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee, tells the story of spending a night in a Kentucky jail in 1971 because a restaurant charged that he left without paying the bill.

"Little did I know at the time, it was a for-whites-only restaurant lacking a sign to that effect," Ward says in "Take A Lesson: Today's Black Achievers on How They Made It & What They Learned Along the Way." (John Wiley & Sons Inc., $16.95)

"They wanted to teach us to avoid their neighborhood, their establishment, their food," he says.

Racism has been a regular part of his life as an African American. But Ward says it's better to look at racism as a situation that can be managed with one's attitude, rather than as a problem that can be cured.

"Getting racism to go away is like trying to boil the ocean," Ward says.

Ward, who graduated from Romulus High and studied engineering at Michigan State University, made it a point to run his own life and embrace adversity.

He worked his way through the ranks at a variety of big-name companies. He joined Maytag Corp. in 1996. He was chairman and chief executive officer for about a year and then resigned in November 2000, citing fundamental differences with the board of directors over the company's strategic outlook.

Take A Lesson: Today's Black Achievers on How They Made It & What They Learned Along the Way includes Interviews with 27 powerful African-American leaders who offer rich stories about how they drove through roadblocks, enhanced their careers by seeking tough assignments, and took the wisdom of their parents to heart.

The interviews were conducted by Caroline Clarke, an editor for Black Enterprise magazine. She concludes that the achievers did not "allow themselves to be pushed and pulled along in life by the whims of circumstance or expectations of others."

Movie director Spike Lee credits his mother for teaching him that "no matter what you want to do, you've got to be able to write." Jacqueline Lee was known for taking out the red marker to correct letters that her son sent home during the summer when he stayed with his grandparents.

A top executive of BET Holdings, Inc., the communications powerhouse, tells of a father who took such an interest in her life that he got a Brown University course catalog to plot classes for her once she decided she wanted to go that school.

"My father saw no limits for me," says Debra Lee, president and chief operating officer for BET Holdings.

"I don't know if that's because I was the third child -- the baby -- and he said 'OK, this is my last chance,' but he really believed I could do absolutely anything," Lee says.

Achievers talk about keeping track of who you are. Holding true to your core values. Associating with the best and brightest. "Stay away from stupid people," says Kenneth Chenault, chief executive officer for American Express Co.

"Although security is nice, don't shy away from organizations in chaos. In business, the greatest opportunities often lie in companies experiencing rapid growth and in those companies forced to reinvent themselves because they are in bad shape," Chenault says.

Chenault has been in the center of chaos. His spacious office, which once had a panoramic view of Manhattan, ended up being near Ground Zero. The American Express headquarters, across the street from the World Trade Center, was devastated during the terrorist attacks.

Drops in travel and depressing times on Wall Street cut into the bottom line, as did a blunder on junk bonds. And Chenault has told shareholders that American Express expects the economy to remain weak in 2002.

Challenging times for a man who thrives on challenges.

Yet one of his key strengths is his ability to be open to different perspectives.

Chenault says in "Take a Lesson" that he often likes to include an African parable in his speeches to illustrate the challenges people in business face.

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest cheetah, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a cheetah wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or it will starve to death. It does not matter whether you are a cheetah, or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you'd better be running!"

The Black Female Body : A Photographic History by Deborah Willis, Carla Williams
Temple Univ Press

Searching for photographic images of black women, Deborah Willis and Carla Williams were startled to find them by the hundreds. In long-forgotten books, in art museums, in European and U.S. archives and private collections, a hidden history of representation awaited discovery. The Black Female Body offers a stunning array of familiar and many virtually unknown photographs, showing how photographs reflected and reinforced Western culture's fascination with black women's bodies.

In the nineteenth century, black women were rarely subjects for artistic studies but posed before the camera again and again as objects for social scientific investigation and as exotic representatives of faraway lands. South Africans, Nubians, enslaved Abyssinians and Americans, often partially or completely naked and devoid of identity, were displayed for the armchair anthropologist or prurient viewer. Willis and Williams relate these social science photographs and the blatantly pornographic images of this era with those of black women as domestics and as nursemaids for white children in family portraits. As seen through the camera lens, Jezebel and Mammy took the form of real women made available to serve white society.

Bringing together some 185 images that span three centuries, the authors offer counterpoints to these exploitive images, as well as testaments to a vibrant culture. Here are nineteenth century portraits of well-dressed and beautifully coifed creoles of color and artistic studies of dignified black women. Here are Harlem Renaissance photographs of entertainer Josephine Baker and writer Zora Neale Hurston.

Documenting the long struggle for black civil rights, the authors draw on politically pointed images by noted photographers like Dorothea Lange, Lewis Hine, and Gordon Parks. They also feature the work of contemporary artists such as Ming Smith Murray, Renee Cox, Coreen Simpson, Chester Higgins, Joy Gregory, and Catherine Opie, who photograph black women asserting their subjectivity, reclaiming their bodies, and refusing the representations of the past.

A remarkable history of the black woman's image, The Black Female Body makes an exceptional gift book and keepsake.

Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece
Ashley Kahn
published by Da Capo Press
Paperback / 224 pages



The moment of creation is an elusive one. Only one person knows when the inspiration for the Sistine Chapel, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" actually struck. To those of us who later come to appreciate these works, the instant of their conception is forever lost. Scholars are left to sift through the fragmentary evidence in search of the source or spark of creativity.

Ashley Kahn, however, is not a scholar. He's a music journalist who has written for Rolling Stone and The New York Times and who once held the cryptic title of "music editor" at the VH1 music video channel. He brings the journalist's tools to bear on the question of creativity. In particular, he tries to find the headwaters of the jazz equivalent of the Nile: Miles Davis.

"Kind of Blue," Davis' 1959 album, is arguably the most popular and most influential jazz album ever made. It was a watershed moment in the development of jazz both because of its content and because of the talents it assembled. The music on "Kind of Blue" stretched the boundaries, indeed the very definition, of jazz. The musicians who made that music would go on to carve out legendary careers.

As Kahn set out to document how "Kind of Blue" came to be, he faced a daunting obstacle. Most of the people involved in the recording have died. Very few people who attended the sessions survive, and only one of them -- drummer Jimmy Cobb -- actually played the music. Fortunately, the other musicians left behind a large written and spoken record of their careers, and most of them recognized the importance of "Kind of Blue."

And what musicians they were. Led by Miles Davis, widely regarded as the most inventive trumpeter of his generation, the band that recorded "Kind of Blue" would have topped any instrument-by-instrument All-Star list of its day: John Coltrane on tenor sax, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley on alto sax, Paul Chambers on bass, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on piano, Cobb on drums. The lineup had evolved over the preceding couple of years as Miles made the transition from the Prestige record label to Columbia, then the dominant jazz and pop label in the country.

The music had been evolving, too. Kahn traces the development of postwar jazz from the Big Band era, through bebop to "cool jazz," of which Miles Davis was a leading figure.

Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" has consistently been ranked as one of the greatest jazz albums ever made

But "Kind of Blue" took jazz into uncharted waters, literally and figuratively. Miles, working with arranger Gil Evans, had been experimenting with a musical structure known as "modal." It abandoned the traditional blues and pop structure of chord changes to support a melody in favor of musical scales. Gone were the "charts," or written arrangements, laying out what each instrument should be playing at each point in a song.

"Call it The Modal Manifesto," Kahn writes. "Subtitled You Can Feel the Changes. In one way, modal jazz was a step in re-simplifying the music, in that it created a structure over which to improvise that, unlike bebop, did not demand extensive knowledge of chords and harmonies. In another way, the use of modes implied a greater responsibility for the musician. Without the established chordal path, the soloist had to invent his own melodic pattern on the spot."

Kahn's excursion into music theory is relatively brief. It's also necessary to place "Kind of Blue" within the context of its times, and within the history of jazz. The author moves from the broader scope of the late-'50s jazz scene into the studio with Miles and company.

"Kind of Blue" was recorded at Columbia's 30th Street facility in New York, a converted church, and a favored venue for session players of the day. The technology of music recording was in transition, from mono to stereo, from acoustic to electronic. For example, the echo chamber at the studio was, quite literally, a chamber for producing echo.

Engineer Frank Laico recalls, "At 30th Street, a line was run from the mixing console down into a low-ceilinged, concrete basement room -- about twelve feet by fifteen feet in size -- where we set up a speaker and a good omnidirectional microphone." The sound from the session was piped into the speaker and the microphone captured the reverberations it made in the room. Laico calls it "a bit of sweetening."

Such rich details help Kahn bring the two "Kind of Blue" sessions to life. He has listened to the master recordings, which captured some of the studio chatter. "Say Wynton," Davis explains just before the first take of "Freddie Freeloader," "after Cannonball, you play again and then we'll come in and end it." Photographs from club dates and the second "Kind of Blue" session capably illustrate Kahn's text.

The five songs that make up "Kind of Blue" hit the jazz world like a magnitude seven earthquake. As Kahn documents, the album influenced generations of musicians and music lovers. He has provided scholars and fans alike an important behind-the-scenes chronicle of how those songs were conceived, refined and recorded. Now, everyone can put "Kind of Blue" on the stereo, open the book, and witness the moment of creation.

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Life and Def: Sex, Drugs, Money, and God
Russell Simmons

Russell Simmons, the original and eternal hip-hop mogul, is one of the most innovative and influential figures in modern American business and culture. When no one outside of inner-city New York had even heard of hip-hop, Simmons saw the seeds of a global force that would change the way people talk, dress, listen to music, and choose the heroes they hang on their walls. Today, he oversees a sprawling, multimillion-dollar empire of culture-defining businesses in everything from music to fashion, advertising to film, and media to visual art. At the same time he’s broadened his interests and influence and pushed hip-hop to new plateaus of power and relevance. Life and Def is a one-of-a-kind tale that interweaves the remarkable journey of Russell Simmons with the story of the culture he’s transformed and been transformed by.

In his own brash, compelling voice, Simmons chronicles his numerous business successes and occasional failures. He tells the story of the founding of the legendary Def Jam Records, whose roster stretches from original rap icons like L.L. Cool J, Public Enemy, and the Beastie Boys to today’s top stars, including Jay-Z and DMX. He traces the launching of Def Comedy Jam, the long-running hit television series that introduced a new generation of black comedic stars to America, from Martin Lawrence and Bill Bellamy to Bernie Mac and Chris Rock. He spins hilarious tales of his adventures in Hollywood, where he’s produced hit movies like Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor and worked with quirky geniuses like Abel Ferrara. He also tells the story of Phat Farm, the wildly successful pioneering urban clothing label whose origins lay in Russell’s longtime fascination with fashion (and fashion models).

Russell didn't get anything easy--he had to fight against the gatekeepers who didn't understand hip-hop, but in the process he created the blueprint for how to take a powerful culture global.

Simmons’s story is also one of personal transformation, from the driven man who in the heady days of early success indulged himself with drugs, sex, and world-class decadence to the husband and father he is today, a man who has found meaning in activism, philanthropy, and spiritual practice while never losing his passion for the social, political, artistic, and commercial potential of hip-hop.

Through it all he relates telling anecdotes about the characters he’s dealt with: models and gangsters, street poets and gurus, and major players like Donald Trump, Sean Combs, Jon Peters, and Tupac Shakur. Full of advice, opinions, and behind-the-scenes scoop, Life and Def is the story of the quintessential hip-hop life.

Read Chapter 1 of "Life and Def."

I Ain't Scared of You : Bernie Mac on How Life Is
by Bernie Mac, Darrell Dawsey
MTV Books

Whether he is heir to Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx as his publicists claim may be debatable, but one thing is for certain....Bernie Mac is a funny man. While Mac has starred in a handful of television shows and movies (most notably Spike Lee's The Original Kings of Comedy, and his new self-named series), his name remains obscured particularly among mainstream audiences by the likes of Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Chris Tucker and the Wayans brothers. His live appearances have earned him a reputation as perhaps the truest voice of modern humor. Now, Mac has captured his comedic genius in print with his hilarious debut book.

In "I Ain't Scared of You" Bernie tackles such topics as professional athletes, sex, religion, marriage, and child-rearing, but his most poignant material stems from his inner-city childhood. Co-written by journalist Dawsey (Living to Tell About It: Black Men in America Speak Their Piece), this book skillfully captures the rhythm and color of Black life in America. There are some perhaps overly confessional moments (e.g., physical fights with his wife), but Mac shows on more than one occasion that he can reach deep into the pockets of human distress and bring forth a smile. "That's what inspires my humor," he writes. "I don't want nobody to cry."

Nobody is safe; nothing is sacred. Not even Bernie himself. Throughout I Ain't Scared Of You, Bernie turns his humor inward, firing off self-deprecating salvos about his golf game, his own personal hypocrisies, even his sexual prowess -- "Women got toys...You can't compete with no dildo."

Mac's insights have earned him critical acclaim and international popularity. Now, I Ain't Scared Of You captures Bernie Mac's humor whole -- unadorned, unpretentious, and unafraid.

Read Chapter 1 of this hilarious book here:

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Martin Luther King, Jr. on Leadership: Inspiration and Wisdom
for Challenging Times
by Donald T. Phillips


Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech was voted the most electrifying public address of the twentieth century. It takes a leader to give that kind of a speech. Donald T. Phillips presents the ideals of leadership that Martin Luther King Jr. followed in an overview of the history of the civil rights struggle. Phillips describes the techniques King used at various stages of the civil rights battle. He also shares King's comments on leadership. Many of the principles will be quite familiar: listen to learn, lead by being led, awaken direct action, encourage creativity and involve the people. However, the book is especially interesting when it demonstrates how King put these principles into practice.

From mastering the art of public speaking to persuading through love and nonviolence, from encouraging imaginative new solutions in changing times to preaching hope, optimism and the power of dreams, this study of Dr. King's leadership offers a definitive and inspiring modern-day example of leadership at its best.

We can all learn from his leadership.

Read Chapter 1 of this insightful book here:


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On Her Own Ground
A'Lelia Bundles

Walker's biographer and great-great granddaughter, A'Lelia Bundles, does not overestimate her importance when she calls Walker one of the pioneers in her use of direct sales (the Fuller Brush Company was founded in 1906, the same year as Walker's), marketing strategies and commissions. Bundles writes: ''As an early advocate of women's economic independence she provided lucrative incomes for thousands of African-American women who otherwise would have been consigned to jobs as farm laborers, washerwomen and maids.'' Walker's philanthropy ranged from the virtuous Y.W.C.A. to the radical N.A.A.C.P.; she began her career soliciting Booker T. Washington's approval and ended it working with W. E. B. Du Bois, Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Shortly before she died in 1919, she planned to organize her sales agents into local clubs that could use their economic clout to protest lynching and other civil rights abuses while improving conditions in their communities.

Bundles's well-paced and well-written book, ''On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker,'' is as much social history as biography, filled with the detail and texture of culture and politics. And rightly so, for Walker's life encompassed Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and World War I. She moved from the kind of poverty that usually ensures anonymity to a 34-room mansion in upstate New York, near the big show houses of John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould; from visits to Tiffany's for diamond jewelry to plans for attending the International Paris Peace Conference in 1919 with a group of blacks determined to lobby for African independence -- which won her a place in the Military Intelligence Division's file of ''Negro subversives.''

She was born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, La., in 1867. Her parents were laborers on the same plantation where they had been slaves, and Sarah labored beside them, chopping and picking cotton. She got about three months of schooling. The rights that Reconstruction had so briefly granted blacks were being snatched away. The Freedmen's Bureau disbanded its education division. And two offshoots of the original Ku Klux Klan were founded nearby, the lyrically named Knights of the White Camellia and the curtly named White League.

Orphaned at the age of 7, Sarah lived with a cruel brother-in-law and a passive sister. ''I married at the age of 14 in order to get a home of my own,'' she later said. She was a mother by 17 and a widow by 20. In 1888 she took her 3-year-old daughter, A'Lelia, and headed north, like thousands of blacks who were fleeing violence and looking for opportunity. For more than half of the employed black women in St. Louis, opportunity meant work as a washerwoman. Sarah did that for 10 years, moving from boardinghouse to boardinghouse.

What Bundles calls Walker's ''scrupulously crafted life story'' began in 1903, when, as she told it so many times afterward, Sarah found herself going bald. (Most rural and poor urban women knew nothing about hair hygiene. They would wash their clothes and scrub their tenement floors, but they might wash their hair once a month.) She prayed to the Lord for guidance, she said, and one night in a dream, ''a big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix for my hair. Some of the remedy was from Africa, but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out.'' After trying it out on her daughter and a neighbor she decided to sell her formula; it was ''inspiration from God,'' a gift to be placed ''in the reach of those who appreciate beautiful hair and healthy scalps which is the glory of woman.''

The actual story wasn't quite so visionary or simple. Walker began as an agent for the black businesswoman she eventually outstripped, Annie Pope-Turbo, whose Poro School of Beauty Culture was already well established in St. Louis. (And whose products, Bundles writes, probably helped Sarah's hair grow back.) In 1906 she headed for Denver, armed with Poro products and a third husband, C. J. Walker. She had her own company by 1906 and a divorce by 1912. Helped by her daughter (who much preferred to party but did her best to please mother), Walker took her Wonderful Hair Grower across the country, selling it, setting up shops and training women in her hair-care methods. By 1907, the washerwoman who had earned $300 a year was earning $300 a month. When she died, of kidney disease, her net worth of $600,000 made her a millionaire in myth, not fact. But that sum, the equivalent of $6 million today, did make her one of the richest businesswomen in America.

Walker was a brilliant publicist. When she spoke of her fears or needs, her tone was unyieldingly crisp: ''I was at my washtubs one morning . . . and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds. I said to myself: 'What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff? Who is going to take care of your little girl?' That set me to thinking, but with all my thinking I couldn't see how I, a poor washerwoman, was going to better my condition.'' But she grew pithy when she talked business; she enjoyed her own toughness. ''Everybody told me I was making a mistake by going into this business, but I know how to grow hair as well as I know how to grow cotton,'' she declared. And: ''My advice to every one expecting to go into business is to hit often and hit hard; in other words, strike with all your might.''

She was a genuine philanthropist who put her money where her beliefs were -- and that money included the advertisements that helped A. Philip Randolph start his socialist magazine, The Messenger. (Randolph's wife, Lucille, helped run the magazine but was also a trained Walker agent.) But she was not above turning accusations of ''undue extravagance'' into race testimonials, telling critics that her mansion, Villa Lewaro -- a pleasure dome with a stucco facade of marble dust and white sand, whose treasures included a Louis XVI chamber suite, an Estey organ and Rodin sculptures -- was ''a Negro institution,'' built to show the race ''what a lone woman accomplished and to inspire them to do big things.'' There is truth here, and there is disingenuousness. Both are fascinating and I wish that instead of presenting them, Bundles had analyzed the relation between them. She suggests that Walker evolved her own version of Andrew Carnegie's ''gospel of wealth,'' which deemed surplus wealth ''a sacred trust to be administered for the good of the community in which it is accumulated.'' An interesting parallel, and Bundles might have further analyzed a woman who had the ruthlessness of a capitalist and the conscience of a progressive. And Bundles need not have been so euphemistic about that fact that in the process of cultivating black hair, Walker's products did, in fact, straighten it. There was a time, especially in the 1960's and 70's, when Walker was accused of fostering black self-hatred. Now, artificially straightened hair is just another option. I am sure that today Madam C. J. Walker would be marketing those treatments for artificially kinked and frizzed hair that have become so popular.

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At Brown, finding himself far behind most of the other freshmen, Cedric must manage a bewildering array of intellectual and social challenges. Cedric had hoped that at college he would finally find a place to fit in, but he discovers he has little in common with either the white students, many of whom come from privileged backgrounds, or the middle-class blacks. Having traveled too far to turn back, Cedric is left to rely on his faith, his intelligence, and his determination to keep alive his hope in the unseen--a future of acceptance and reward that he struggles, each day, to envision.

Broadway Books, a division of Random House, recently published a paperback version. Oprah and Ted Koppel have interviewed both Suskind and Cedric, there's talk of a movie, colleges are buying the book in bulk for diversity workshops, and inner-city schools are assigning it to inspire their students.

Author Suskind met Cedric during his junior year of high school and told his story and the stories of some Ballou classmates to Wall Street Journal readers in a series of articles for which Suskind won the Pulitzer Prize. With a book in mind, Suskind continued to follow Cedric. When the teen-ager was accepted by Brown University in Providence, Suskind said, "I knew I had a book."

"That's what connected the 'other America' of Cedric's neighborhood to 'our America,' " Suskind said. "It was his hope to find a home in 'our America' that would reveal our deepest feelings about race."

While "Hope" makes a strong case for providing college opportunities to students who can't be measured by the conventional yardsticks of standardized tests and advanced placement courses, it is not a preachy book (in fact, the only preaching comes from Bishop Long, the pastor at the church Cedric and his mother, Barbara, attend). The story is told not from the point of view of a well-meaning, white reporter, but from Cedric's perspective.

In "Hope," Suskind says, "I stopped telling the reader what to think." He allowed the characters to be more complicated, even if their actions were not admirable or helpful.

What Suskind did with Cedric and the 12 other "characters" in the book was spend a given day following, watching, listening, writing down pages of dialogue. That night, he would "debrief" the character, reminding him or her of the actions and conversations, and probing with questions such as "What were you thinking when you said that?" or "Why did you do that?" He would go through the process with everyone involved in an incident or conversation, so the reporting for the book was remarkably time-consuming. But it enabled him to write the book from inside the characters, which is what makes it read like fiction instead of conventional journalism.

The result is that the readers of "Hope" truly feel as if they know Cedric. Suskind says that strangers say to him, almost daily, "Say 'Hi!' to Cedric for me," as if he's an old friend.

"It is the genuine human complexities that allow the characters to break out of the stereotypes," Suskind said. "I was able to show that their lives are as complicated as ours."

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