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

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 [...]

When a book is about an author’s compelling personal history, nothing brings the book alive as much as actually meeting the author or seeing them in an interview. Wes Moore, author of The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, was a featured guest on a recent installment of The Oprah Show about people with [...]

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 [...]

Despite the grim subject matter, I smiled when I read A Thousand Sisters: My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman, when the author, Lisa Shannon wrote of meeting Alice Walker in the Congo when they were both visiting Women for Women International. Weeks before I’d read Walker’s book, Overcoming Speechlessness: [...]

While in a public library this week, I saw a representative of the US Census Bureau manning a desk set up as a questionnaire assistance center to make sure everyone had received and returned the census form and to answer any questions. The neighborhood was one with a very racially and ethnically mixed population. I [...]

In my twenties, not long out of college, I was approached by a middle-aged black woman about joining the National Council of Negro Women. Proud of myself as a young black woman, I wasn’t interested in joining a group of middle-aged Negro women. I’d forgotten that particular bit of callowness until I read Jesus, Jobs, [...]

Is there anyting more frustrating and heartbreaking that what seems to be happening to public schools? Education — standardized testing, school reform, teacher training — these are all things I’ve followed with a passion beyond that of a book reviewer and concerned citizen, but the zeal of a parent with children in the “system.” The [...]