I noticed these on amazon and realize they are quite old titles.

Has anyone read either of these 2 books or offer feedback on the authors? Or would anyone care to suggest a comparable, and more recent alternative?

Africa's Gift to America: The Afro-American in the Making and Saving of the United States : With New Supplement, Africa and Its Potentialities (Hardcover)
by J. A. Rogers
Publisher: Helga M. Rogers; Revised edition (June 1961)
ISBN: 0960229469


The destruction of Black civilization;: Great issues of a race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D
by Chancellor Williams
Publisher: Kendall/Hunt Pub. Co (1971)
ISBN: 0840304587

No, those two old warhorses will do the job just fine. I am sure you will enjoy them both.

What Makes A Tree Smile?
Tamina Pitt and Terri Janke
Illustrated by Francine Ngardarb Riches

ISBN 1875641 80 7
pb, 24pp, 165x154mm

Written by 7 year old Tamina Pitt and her mum, Terri Janke, this is a beautifully illustrated exploration of how a young girl perceives the natural world. Very cute and just a little bit cheeky – a delightful little book for early readers.

The Man From the Sunrise Side
By Ambrose Chalarimeri

ISBN 1 875641 02 5
pb, 238pp, 220x150mm

Shortlisted—WA Premier’s Book Awards and NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. An insight into a man’s precarious journey from traditional beginnings in the Kimberley bush under the protection of ancient, ancestral rock paintings, to life under the alien colonial system of Kalumburu Mission. A welcome balance to the history books.

Everyone Eats
Undertanding Food and Culture
E.N. Anderson

Aaaah... combining two of my top 3 passions in a book! And I bought it cheap in a sale...yippee!

Everyone eats, but rarely do we ask why or investigate why we eat what we eat. Why do people love some foods, what are the social and cultural reasons for our food choices...?

E.N. Anderson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. His previous books include Ecologies of the Heart: Emotion, Belief, and the Environment.

Has anyone read Michael Eric Dyson's book Come Hell or High Water: Katrina?

A quote I noticed while scanning the book quickly - while I should have been working - struck me:
"Active malice & passive indifference are but flip sides of the same racial coin."

Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Hardcover)
ISBN: 0465017614

Hurricane Katrina : The Destruction of New Orleans (Paperback)
ISBN: 1419618512

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The first major book to be released about Hurricane Katrina, Dyson's volume not only chronicles what happened when, it also argues that the nation's failure to offer timely aid to Katrina's victims indicates deeper problems in race and class relations. Dyson's time lines will surely be disputed, his indictments of specific New Orleans failures defended or whitewashed. But these points are secondary. More important are the larger questions Dyson (Between God and Gangsta Rap, etc.) poses, such as "What do politicians sold on the idea of limited governance offer to folk who need, and deserve, the government to come to their aid?" "Does George Bush care about black people?" and "Do well-off black people care about poor black people?" With its abundance of buzz-worthy coinages, like "Aframnesia" and "Afristocracy," Dyson's populist style sometimes gets too cute. But his contention that Katrina exposed a dominant culture pervaded not only by "active malice" toward poor blacks but also by a long history of "passive indifference" to their problems is both powerful and unsettling. Through this history of neglect, Dyson suggests, America has broken its social contract with poor blacks who, since Emancipation, have assumed that government will protect all its citizens. Yet when disaster struck the poor, the cavalry arrived four days late. (Jan. 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information

Lots of great new books to shout out about... including a beautifully produced new book by Cassandra Pybus.

Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty by Cassandra Pybus

And a really wonderful book I received as a gift... Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices From a New Generation of Women - by Paula Goldman. The book includes art, ideas and poetry from a range of women around the globe including Zadie Smith, Rokia Traore, Ani Difranco and Angelique Kidjo. Beautiful and inspiring.

Has anyone heard of, or read any of Gary Younge's books? He sounds interesting.

Stranger in A Strange Land: Encounters in the DisUnited States
Gary Younge
ISBN 1595580689



Staff writer at the Guardian since 1994, and frequent contributor to the Nation.
Younge was the recipient of the Washington Post's Lawrence Stern Fellowship from the Nation Institute in 2006. His previous book is No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South. He lives in New York City.

ECONOMICS

Why Most Things Fail
… And how to avoid it
Paul Ormerod
ISBN 0571220134



From the bestselling author of The Death of Economics and Butterfly Economics, a ground-breaking look at a truth all too seldom acknowledged: most commercial and public policy ventures will not succeed.

Paul Ormerod draws upon recent advances in biology to help us understand the surprising consequence of the Iron Law of Failure. And he shows what strategies corporations, businesses and governments a will need to adopt to stand a chance of prospering in a world where only one thing is certain.

‘Economics as it is now taught does not explain why so much endeavour ends in failure… This is a fascinating analysis.’ The Times.

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SOCIOLOGY/CRIMINOLOGY

Race to Incarcerate
- The Sentencing Project.
Marc Mauer



In this revised edition of his seminal book on race, class, and the criminal justice system, March Mauer, executive director of one of the nation’s leading criminal justice reform organizations, offers the most up-to-date book available at three decades of prison expansion in America.

Including newly written material on recent developments under the Bush administration, and updated statistics, graphs, and charts throughout, the book tells the tragic story of runaway growth in the number of prisons and jails, and the overreliance on imprisonment to stem problems of economic and sociald evelopment.

Called "upsetting and powerful" by Kirkus Reviews, Race to Incarcerate documents the enormous financial and human toll of the "get tough" movement and argues for more humane – and productive – alternatives.

"Race to Incarcerate explains why prisoners have become commodities and why present policies are draining black communities of their young men." - Julian Bond, Chair fo the NAACP Board of Directors.

Marc Mauer is executive director of The Sentencing Project, a national organization based in Washington, D.C., that promotes criminal justice reform and the development of alternatives to incarceration. He has served as a consultant to the Burea of Justice Assistance, the National Institute of Corrections, and the American Bar Association.

WOMEN & CULTURE

SHATTERING THE STEREOTYPE
~ Muslim Women Speak Out
edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan
foreword by Nawal El Saadawi
ISBN 1566565693


USA cover


Australian cover

Fawzia Afzal-Khan, a scholar, poet, playwright, and singer trained in the North Indian classical tradition, is professor of English at Montclair State University.


"The great achievement of this superbly edited anthology is that it discredits both the pernicious stereotype of the oppressed 'Muslim Woman' and the naive 'us-them' logic which drives the self-fulfilling prophecy of the 'clash of civilizations,' while at the same times offering alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting."
- Wail S. Hassan, author of Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction.

"This inspiring, original anthology shatters damning silences and ignorance and offers an evocation and many-sided portrait of Muslim women.

From terrorism to war to occupation to exile to activiism to fundamentalism to religion - these authors cover topics with bravery, generosity, and clarity of vision."
- E. Giunta, author of Writing with an Accent: Comtemporary Italian American Women Authors.

Small Island was a good read. Below is a review from Amazon.com. A member of our bookclub, who is Jamican, said, "This is her parents story of migrating from the island to the MOTHER land."

Winner of the UK's Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, the Orange Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Small Island may soon find deserved success in the US, too. Set in London in 1948, it focuses on the diaspora of Jamaicans, who, escaping economic hardship on their own "small island," move to England, the Mother Country, for which the men have fought during World War II. Their reception is not the warm embrace they have hoped for, nor are the opportunities for success as plentiful as they have dreamed.

Four characters alternate points of view, telling their stories with an honesty and vibrancy that make the tragicomedy of their lives both realistic and emotionally involving. Queenie Bligh, a white woman with a mentally ill father-in-law, takes in boarders when her husband Bernard does not return from war in India. Most of her boarders are black immigrants from the Caribbean, desperate men and women willing to pay high prices for small rooms. Gilbert Joseph, a Jamaican who participated in the Battle of Britain, is one of Queenie's tenants, working as a truck driver, the only job available to him. Gilbert's bride Hortense arrives from Jamaica with her heavy trunk a few months later, ready to show London her superior "British" manners. When Queenie's husband Bernard unexpectedly returns shortly thereafter, life at Queenie's changes forever.

These four characters, through their often touching first-person narratives, convey their hopes and dreams for the future, revealing, as their stories intersect, their personalities, family backgrounds, experiences in love, commitments to the Mother Country, economic predicaments, and, not incidentally, their prejudices.

Levy imbues this novel with fine detail, both in her descriptions of the physical surroundings and in the emotional subtleties with which her characters react to their postwar lives. Her ear for dialogue is exquisite, both in the everyday speech of Londoners and in the dialect and sentence patterns of Jamaicans. Casual, conversational tones bring the characters to life, while Gilbert's recognition of "the way things are" keeps the novel from becoming polemical or strident, despite its thematic emphasis on prejudice and injustice. Levy's touch is light, often humorous, and her scenes of amusing irony are nicely balanced by scenes of high drama.

The author's tendency to tie her male characters to real, historical events--the Hindu/Muslim riots in Calcutta (experienced by Bernard) and a race-based riot at a London movie theater (experienced by Gilbert)--and her reliance on extreme coincidence to conclude the action, do occasionally feel intrusive and manipulative, but this is a minor quibble. This hugely conceived novel has everything going for it--well-drawn characters, vivid descriptions of an unusual time in postwar London, important themes which are not beaten to death, and lively action and interactions which keep the reader constantly involved.

thanks, it sounds really interesting.

A Different Shade of Grey: Midlife & Beyond in the Inner City.
Katherine Newman
ISBN 1595580816

I've just started reading this, and while some of the social and political realities of the book won't be new to you, they are new to me.

A lot has been written online and off about urban African American youth, bling, and rap culture, but I haven't seen much written about the current older generation of urban African Americans, their hopes, their gains, their issues, stolen dreams, and the realities of facing old age in the city - especially those without a support network, or those facing old age alone.

This book is a mix of personal true life stories from interviews, and statistics.
It is a fascinating, poignant and sobering read.

The book follows how "some groups managed to turn disadvantage into self-determination, while others collapsed in heaps and gave up. To understand [their] fate is to move beyond the self and to the organization of the wider society, the way it deals with race and poverty, immigration and displacement."


Here is a quote from the back cover, and below it, excerpts from the book.
FF.



"...the experience of middle and old age differs dramatically for whites and minorites, for the middle class and the poor, and for those living in the suburbs versus the city. Focusing on the lives of older African Americans and Latinos in parts of New York City where wages are low, crime is high, and the elderly have few supports they can rely on, this book provides a well-documented portrait of a little-examined group (Kirkus Review)

"A very thoughful and clear picture of growing old in the inner city." - Clamor

excerpt...

"...we know what became of young men and women who grew up in ... the inner city in the 1970's and 1980's [because it has been chronicled in book and film]. What we know less about is how some of those conditions of the 1970-80's - how the deterioration of housing projects, the breakdown of families - ultimately affected their elders, the people who crested into midlife and started down the road to old age in the very same neighborhoods.

Most of them were examples of upward mobility when compared to their own parents. Civil servants, blue-collar factory workers, secretaries in law firms security guards, they caught the wave of postwar economic expansion and equal opportunity.

~ ~

Growing old ... is also a social transformation that reshapes a perosn's identity or social role, moving from parent to grandparent, worker to retiree.

The slice of time each of us moves through contains its own possibliities and limitations. The oldest people...in this book...were born when the country was stuck in the rut of the Great Depression and came of age during World War II."

~ ~

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ENVIRONMENT



The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future
Author: Elizabeth C. Economy, C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies

April 2004
352 pages
ISBN 0-8014-4220-6
US$29.95

Selected by The Globalist as one of the top ten books of 2004, The River Runs Black is the most comprehensive and balanced volume to date on China’s growing environmental crisis and its implications for the country’s development. Based on historical research, case studies, and interviews with officials, scholars, and activists in China, this book provides insightful analysis of the economic and political roots of China’s environmental challenge as well as the evolution of the leadership’s response.

China ’s spectacular economic growth over the past two decades has dramatically depleted the country’s natural resources and produced skyrocketing rates of pollution. Environmental degradation has also contributed to significant public health problems, mass migration, economic loss, and social unrest. Elizabeth C. Economy argues that China ’s approach to environmental protection mirrors its economic development program: devolving authority to local officials, opening the door to private individuals, and inviting participation from the international community, while retaining only weak central control.

The result has been a patchwork of environmental protection in which a few wealthy regions with strong leaders and international ties improve their local conditions, while most of the country continues to deteriorate, and some regions suffer irrevocable damage. Economy examines the growing role of nongovernmental groups in protecting the environment and expanding the boundaries of political action, and she sketches out several environmental scenarios for the country.

A friend suggested I check out this novel, Grandpa's Fiddle by Tim Halloran.

Although Tim is white he has written a novel about an African-American slave and his family, which "is receiving awesome reviews..."

Grandpa's Fiddle, is one American family's journey in the 1820's to the American frontier and thier freedom. An American tale where a boy learns the meaning of family and the ties that bind us all as people.

"It is a personable, adventurous, historical, account taking place in the 1800s era during the emancipation of African slaves in America..." - Daphne Allen

http://www.grandpasfiddle.com/book.htm

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I was suprised and delighted to find a new release/edition of this on a Sydney bookshelf - after finding information on Paul Robeson Snr. once while doing a web search way back on famous African American actors from back in the day... I subsequently posted details on AA.org sometime back, about his extraordinary life, his command of languages, artistic and musical talents - and his disgusting treatment by the US Government. Paul Robeson Snr. was an extraordinary man... and part of his 'reversal of fortunes' was linked to some of the political views he expressed, some of which are revisited in this book by his son Paul Robeson Jr. Certainly compulsory reading, if not one for your library.

http://ec3.images-amazon.com/images/P/1583227253.01._BO...ZZZZZ_V66858274_.jpg
This is the book on sale on Amazon.


A Black Way of Seeing: From Liberty to Freedom
by Paul Robeson

ISBN 1583227253
Format PaperBack
Category NonFiction - Politics
Publisher Seven Stories Press,U.S.
Publication Date 31-Jul-2006

From Publishers Weekly
For more than 20 years, Robeson was "close aide and personal representative" to his father, actor and activist Paul Robeson Sr. Robeson's latest book, following Paul Robeson Jr. Speaks to America: The Politics of Multiculturalism and The Undiscovered Paul Robeson, An Artist's Journey, continues the elder Robeson's tradition of speaking out thoughtfully and frankly, and sketches a vision of American history where Black Americans, from slavery forward, have been forced to live a "separate reality" from white Americans. He begins with the race implications of 9/11, where he finds hurtful spin by Giuliani ("The Mayor's implied message was clear: We have a lily-white fire department, and we're going to keep it that way"), and moves on to "Eight Coups in American History" ("George Bush's mission in the White House is to establish nationwide a modern version of the old Confederacy based on the New South"), an account of the War on Terror and of voter fraud in the last two presidential elections, and a program for Black Americans to support the Progressive party along class lines. Like most "my vision for America" books, this one is thin on documentation, but thick with passion.


From Booklist
Robeson critiques America as sharply as his famous father did. His commentary rooted in the concepts expounded by our nation's Founding Fathers, Robeson expands on the idea of "liberty" for the elite few to an active concept of freedom yet to be obtained by the many. - Vernon Ford

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Went to a publisher's 'do' last night and one of the books they are promoting and estimate to be a big seller {here in Australia} for pre-xmas sales is John LeCarre's Mission Song, set in the Congo. About corporate corruption etc. Publication date is Sept 16.


(book will be published with alternative black/white covers)

Unfortunately that was NOT one of the 6 free books in the showbag.

Anyone read much of his work? I haven't read anything LeCarre - just seen the films lol. Life is too short and my current 'required' reading list too long.

ENVIRONMENT/CIVILISATION

I hadn't heard of this author before, but the first book below sounds interesting...any feedback appreciated as online opinions differ widely...

Derrick Jensen, activist, author, small farmer, teacher, and philosopher, is the author of A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe. A finalist for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize whose writing has been described as "breaking and mending the reader's heart," Jensen's speaking engagements in recent years have packed university auditoriums, conferences, and bookstores nationwide.



Endgame: Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization
ISBN 158322730X
528 pages

Endgame: Volume 2: Resistance
1583227245
496 pages

Vol 1:

Jensen comes across in volume I as a provocative but personable philosopher-activist who in lyrical and witty writing bemoans species extinction, sullied air quality, shrinking icecaps, expanding deserts and vanishing forests wrought by humans. But Jensen believes "this culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living." Civilization, he says in volume II, is killing the planet, so "[c]ivilization needs to be brought down now." Jensen dwells through several chapters on the need to destroy tens of thousands of river dams, whether with pickax-wielding citizen armies or through the use of well-placed explosive charges; other chapters consider how simple it would be to paralyze the American capitalist system if small activist cells were to disrupt railway, highway, pipeline and other elements of commercial infrastructure. Jensen clearly feels a close connection to nature, writes movingly about the hoped-for return of the salmon, the trees, the grizzly bears. But he has become so disgusted with what he calls "civiluzation" that he has more compassion for the salmon than for his fellow humans. (June)

Jensen, has a deserved reputation as a writer of consequence and conscience who has pursued an environmentalist message with great fervor. In his latest work, he argues for the necessary destruction of civilization to save the world. Jensen posits his case against industrial development through discussion of everything from dams to the use of torture by the U.S. military.

Endgame touches on numerous valid and necessary subjects, but Jensen's strident tone and heavy reliance on sources that fully support his message weaken his presentation.

Vol 2:

Whereas Volume 1 of Endgame presents the problem of civilization, Volume 2 of this pivotal work illustrates our means of resistance. Incensed and hopeful, impassioned and lucid, Endgame leap-frogs the environmental movement's deadlock over our willingness to change our conduct, focusing instead on our ability to adapt to the impending ecological revolution.

Derrick Jensen, activist, author, small farmer, teacher, and philosopher, is the author of A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe. A finalist for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize whose writing has been described as "breaking and mending the reader's heart," Jensen's speaking engagements in recent years have packed university auditoriums, conferences, and bookstores nationwide.

just reading up more about Jensen...

BIOGRAPHY



A Language Older Than Words
by Derrick Jensen
1931498555

From Publishers Weekly
Singular, compelling and courageously honest, this book is more than just a poignant memoir of a harrowingly abusive childhood. It relates the extraordinary journey of one man striving to save his own spirit and our planet's. Comparing his physically and sexually abusive father's destruction of his family with humankind's systematic destruction of civilization, New York Times Magazine contributor Jensen (Listening to the Land) tells a story about the hope for regeneration in a landscape of human and natural desolation. Throughout, Jensen mobilizes his experiences as student, teacher, environmentalist, beekeeper, high jumper, abused child and survivor to delve deeper inside his own wounded psyche while condemning the constrictions of a culture that fosters abuse. In lyrical prose, Jensen calls for accountability and urges people "to live in dynamic equilibrium with the rest of the world." Rather than na?vely proposing an answer to the ills of modernity, he demonstrates the complexity of the problems by examining an array of environmental and sociopolitical atrocities, including the Holocaust, and what he sees as the reckless production of plutonium to further space exploration and the maltreatment of indigenous peoples by self-serving neighbors. His visceral, biting observations always manage to lead back to his mantra: "Things don't have to be the way they are." Jensen's book accomplishes the rare feat of both breaking and mending the reader's heart.