For you DC-area-locals who were wondering, debut novelist A.X. Ahmad is one of us ...
Even before Naomi Benaron's debut novel hit shelves last year, it earned a substantial literary gold sticker as the winner of the biennial 2010 Bellwether Prize – the largest monetary award for unpublished fiction in North America, which was rebranded in 2011 as the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially...
Arthur Flowers, a "blues-based" performance poet, musician, and professor, introduces himself as "Rickydoc Trickmaster," to render the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. into a biography for younger readers, as traditional Patua Indian scroll painter Manu Chitrakar brings Flowers' recitation to vibrant life. Their combined...
In segregated Greenville, North Carolina, 14-year-old Mason Steele has the rare talent to transcribe his father's impassioned descriptions of civil rights incidents into effective business letters determined to educate and change people's minds. His father's civil rights group rewards young Mason's efforts with a typewriter....
Clearly I waited too long to read this book, even though it sat ready on my shelves and on my iPod for years. Before I lament further, you should know that if you choose to go audible, Firdous Bamji doesn't disappoint; he remains one of the...
I think I was somehow predestined to read Mudbound when I did: just after I finished Barbara Kingsolver's mightily disappointing Flight Behavior, I turned next to Hillary Jordan's 2008 debut novel. While searching for an image of the book cover to load here, I noticed...
1958, Little Rock, Arkansas: A year has passed since nine courageous African American students – history's "Little Rock Nine" – integrated Central High School. Just days before the new school year is scheduled to begin that September 15, then-Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus closed the city's three high...
When Pancho Sanchez arrives at St. Anthony's Home, his 17-year-old self has already survived too much death, and yet he's planning on more. The last of his family – his mentally challenged 20-year-old sister – was found dead in a motel room. While the police insist what...
Already designated “definitive political biography” on its back cover, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Brooklyn College political science professor Jeanne Theoharis will reside in my personal reading history as the most difficult book I’ve ever reviewed. Never before – and hopefully never...
Let me start with what has been deemed as historical record. According to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation – which not only owns and operates Jefferson's legendary home, Monticello, but maintains the most comprehensive website focused on "Monticello, Jefferson, his family, and his times" – this is the official...
Thus far, mega-award winning Junot Díaz (also recently bestowed the "Genius" moniker by the MacArthur Foundation) hasn't written a book without his sort-of autobiographical stand-in Yunior de las Casas. Díaz's 1996 fiction debut, Drown, introduced Yunior through interlinked short stories; a decade-plus later, Díaz turned over full narrative control to his...
The Spy Lover lingered on the top of my must-read pile for months, mainly because I just needed a break from the death and destruction of war (seems to be my reading theme for too much of this year!). I wasn't wrong to be afraid: set during...
Only when Louise Erdrich won this year's National Book Award for The Round House, did I learn that House is the middle of a planned trilogy that begins with The Plague of Doves which, most serendipitously, was already loaded on my iPod. A bit of...
Canadian eco-architect David H.T. Wong's debut defies simple categorization: while clearly a graphic work for younger readers (much of the language is soooo totally tweenage vernacular), Escape covers some 200 years of history through the fictional story of a Chinese Canadian American family, also named Wong, whose experiences...
Gilead and Home are parallel stories – that is, one is not a sequel or prequel of the other, but what happens in one, happens contemporaneously in the other. As satisfying as each novel can be alone, to read both one after the other will be...
While I can hardly estimate the many, many books I’ve read about the Japanese American experience during World War II, I know few details about what happened to Japanese Canadians. The lone fact that looms is that like their Japanese American counterparts on the West...
The legendary 1993 Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison begins her latest novel with a jarring disconnect of warning: the title is Home, and yet the first pages open with an unannotated verse – "Whose house is this? / ...
As much as I enjoy collections populated by multiple contributors, I have yet to finish a multi-writer title in which every chapter from cover to cover is of memorable quality. That said, The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays, edited by Tara L. Masih, featuring 20...
The PR materials that arrived with this remarkable title contains one of the most effective descriptions of the Japanese American imprisonment during World War II I've ever read: " ...
Being always a dozen or so titles behind, a confluence of certain events seem to need to happen for some posts to finally get from my brain to the ...
