Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Like most black Americans of the civil rights generation, I recognize the iconic photograph of Elizabeth Eckford in 1957 as she was taunted and threatened by white hecklers on her first day of school — the first day of school for nine black students at the newly desegregated Little Rock (Arkansas) Central High School. The first [...]

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley, is the most stolen book in American libraries, according to an attendee at a recent symposium on Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. That declaration of the popularity of Haley’s book, and the iconic status of the book and its subject, was reportedly based on [...]

Some fifty years and nearly twenty miles from the site of operation of the notorious Chicago gang the Almighty Black P Stone Nation, nearly sixty people gathered recently to discuss the book of same title that examines the rise and fall of that gang and its leader. The setting was the main library in Oak [...]

Nearly a year ago, I was in a public library for a class on online research tools, searching a site for biographies. On a whim I typed in the name George Edwin Taylor. I happened to have the galley of the book, For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, His Historic Run for the White House, [...]

“This is our story,” a friend declared in a recent email to me and  others. By “our history” she meant the history of African Americans living in northern cities throughout the US whose parents or grandparents had migrated from the South (which is to say the overwhelming majority of us). Her declaration was about Isabel [...]

If I hadn’t read Will Bunch’s The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, I might have been more mystified by several recent developments. Monday, NBC’s Brian Williams, in an exclusive interview with President Barack Obama, asked for a response to charges that the president is not a native-born [...]

First day on her job as the director of the Racial Justice Project of the American Civil Liberties Union in Northern California,  Michelle Alexander saw a bright yellow poster declaring: “The drug war is the new Jim Crow.” Skeptical, she went on to work. But within ten years she would accept the declaration on that [...]

I’m not exactly sure when I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It might have been in college as part of a black literature course or after college as “required reading” for any young black person with any level of race consciousness. But I have certainly come to know Ellison more through reading about him, particularly [...]

When a person has lived as long as Lena Horne (92 years) and been as famous as she was, it’s hard to imagine there’s much more to add to the volumes of words that have already been written about her. Iconic — absolutely. Stormy Weather, the unauthorized biography by James Gavin, filled in a lot [...]

The news last week of the death of 98-year-old Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, recalled for me the March 22 blog “Black Church Women and Other Ordinary People.” I meant the title to be ironic, still, Height was anything but ordinary. The NCNW, with more than 4 [...]