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

I’ve been listening with keen interest to interviews with Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. In the last few weeks, he’s been interviewed by Robert Siegel of All Things Considered and Tom Ashbrook of On Point, both on NPR. In Coming Apart, Murray observes that the current generation of [...]

It’s been 20 years since Anita Hill had the temerity to challenge the U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. It took a lot of nerve for her to come forth with allegations of sexual harassment against a man who was lined up to be the second African American male to serve on the Supreme [...]

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 [...]

With the frenzy of another school year ended, I’ve had the time to reflect on the past year – one where I was fortunate enough to be able to send both my sons abroad. The 8th grader went to Barcelona with his Spanish class, the college senior went to Tanzania in a semester abroad program. [...]

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 [...]

However a person might feel about the great debate regarding public school reform (vouchers, charters, etc.), the idealism – at least – of Teach for America seems to be broadly admired. It’s regarded as the education equivalent of the Peace Corps. During the holiday season I had the pleasure of meeting one of its members, [...]

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 [...]

The term third world is generally applied to underdeveloped nations, which unfortunately are mostly populated by people with brown skin. So even though Arianna Huffington’s book Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream is about the US economy in general, some readers might not be able [...]