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At this time of the year, when we start to see flowering bulbs and cherry trees begin to bloom, I'm ready for some great beach reads. Set in the island location of Martha's Vineyard, Summer on the Bluffs by Sunny Hostin is the first instalment in the author's Oak Bluffs series. This book has all the beach vibes I have come to love and more.

Amelia Vaux Tanner and her husband built a cottage thirty years ago in the exclusive black beach community of Oak Bluffs. Although their home has hosted many political and business icons, the couple's favourite guests have been their three "goddaughters" : Perry a talented Afro-Latina lawyer, Olivia a gifted Wall Street analyst and Billie a successful marine biologist. These young woman refer to Amelia as Ama and have cherished their summers growing up together in Oak Bluff.

This summer, Ama is seventy-one and has lost her beloved husband. She has invited the three young women for one last summer together. At the end of the summer she will leave this prized home to one of them. The three young women each have secrets of their own and hope that this will not diminish their chances of inheriting this home. What they don't realize is that Ama also has a secret to share with each of them.

I adored this book and was pleasantly surprised to find it to be more dramatic than I expected. The characters were all well developed, with unique personalities and histories. The story was engaging, full of intrigue and mystery, and embraced in romance and love. I loved the diversity in this book and the inclusivity. I appreciated the fact that the protagonists were all strong, successful women. The theme of the book to me was that none of us are perfect: we are human, and we make mistakes. It is what we do to amend the situation that elevates us. I look forward with anticipation to reading the second book in the series.

I listened to the audiobook version of the book which was narrated by January LaVoy. Her performance was full of expression and well articulated. I listened to the book at my usual 1.25x speed and this was very comfortable. I would not hesitate to recommend this version of the book for those that appreciate this format.

What I Liked About Summer on the Bluffs:

The level of drama and engagement of the reader

Diverse, well-developed characters

Strong female protagonists

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Summer on the Bluffs by Sunny Hostin - A Book Review - That Happy Reader

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At this time of the year, when we start to see flowering bulbs and cherry trees begin to bloom, I'm ready for some great beach reads. Set in the island location of Martha's Vineyard, Summer on the Bluffs by Sunny Hostin is the first instalment in the author's Oak Bluffs series.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/books/review/the-three-mothers-anna-malaika-tubbs.html

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From Gates Scholar and First Lady of Stockton, CA, comes the first book to celebrate the three great women who raised and shaped America's most pivotal heroes: MLK, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin.

Much has been written about the Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them, who themselves were all born within six years of each other, all contending with the very specific prejudices faced by Black women during Jim Crow.

Berdis, Alberta, and Louise all possessed an unrelenting belief in education-from Louise asking her children to read to her from the dictionary, to Berdis's faith and encouragement in her son's preternaturally gifted writing, to Alberta's unwavering dedication to Martin's higher education. These women used their strength and motherhood to push their sons toward greatness, all with a conviction that all human beings deserve dignity and respect despite the rampant racism of the 20th century.

These three mothers taught resistance and a fundamental belief in the worth of black Americans to their sons, even when these beliefs flew in the face of America's racist practices and led to ramifications for all three families' safety. The fight for equal justice and dignity came above all else for the three mothers.

These women, their similarities and differences, as individuals and as mothers, represent a piece of history left untold and a celebration of black motherhood long overdue.

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The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped - Harvard Book Store

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From Gates Scholar and First Lady of Stockton, CA, comes the first book to celebrate the three great women who raised and shaped America's most pivotal heroes: MLK, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Much has been written about the Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin, and Louise Little's son Malcolm.

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Purposeful get-togethers and nights of conversation between friends can cement our relationships, start movements, and shape our memories for years. Priya Parker, a professional facilitator and the founder of Thrive Labs, asks us to re-imagine our approach to gathering in her new book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.

The reasons we gather are as varied as we are, says Parker. "We gather to solve problems we can't solve on our own. We gather to celebrate, to mourn, and to mark transitions. We gather to make decisions. We gather because we need one another. We gather to show strength."

But often, we skip a few necessary steps when organizing gatherings, with lackluster results. Events flourish when they're built on thoughtfulness, structure, curiosity, and generosity of spirit, says Parker. Here's how to pull off a meaningful gathering.

Even in cases with obvious purpose (to read a book, to celebrate a birthday) there's often a way to go deeper.

Ask yourself: What do people want from the gathering? Are the book club members only there to discuss literature, or are they there because it is the one night of the month they see their old friends?

Small considerations like this can lead you to plan the event differently. Perhaps you will schedule two hours instead of one, so friends have time to catch up. Or maybe you ask your friends to bring a potluck snack along with their books, so the evening feels less like a university lecture and more like the reunion that it is.

By having a clearly identified purpose for the event, participants will have more chances to actually connect, and not be disappointed.

By having a clearly identified purpose for the event, participants will have more chances to actually connect, and not be disappointed.

People like when the host is present and engaged. As Parker says, "no one wants to sail on a skipper-less ship." Here are three tips to be an engaged host:

Stay in charge. Keeping a friendly, but firm attitude makes it less likely an overbearing guest will take control of the gathering. Parker reminds us that hosting doesn't stop when people walk in the door. In fact, that's when your guests might need you the most.

Make introductions. You may have different kinds of guests at your gathering: people attending solo, married couples, old friends, and new acquaintances. Parker is in favor of making many introductions between strangers early in the night - with links to common interests, and lots of compliments.

Get people talking. Parker advocates posing questions to the group, and having conversation starters that match the theme. When the host is confident and the attendees are engaged, gently prompted conversations can lead to more depth. "A talented gatherer doesn't hope for disparate people to become a group," Parker says. "She makes them a group."

Preparing your guests for the gathering an art in itself. "The bigger the ask-say, if you're having people travel long distances to attend your gathering-the more care, attention, and detail should be put into the pregame phase," says Parker. This is how you set the stage for the kind of gathering you'd like to have.

"The bigger the ask-say, if you're having people travel long distances to attend your gathering-the more care, attention, and detail should be put into the pregame phase."

If you want to spark creativity at your gathering, perhaps your pregame might include sending your guests an article about how to unleash their imaginations. If you want people to show up to a work meeting with their guards down, ready to share, "maybe send an email out ahead of time that includes real, heartfelt testimonials from three senior leaders sharing personal, specific examples of the transformative power that a mentor had on them," suggests Parker.

The pregame doesn't have to be extravagant-it can be as simple as an email that sets the tone-but it's an essential piece of planning for an authentic gathering.

There's nothing worse than an event that feels never-ending. Here are two ways to bring the event to a close, while reminding guests of the gathering's purpose:

Connect one last time. Give guests a chance to reflect on the event, and what they've taken away from it. This may mean winding down slowly, instead of ushering people out all at once. Parker says, "Whatever your final moment is, it should be authentic and should make sense of your context."

Transition back to the real world. This moment should be a way of helping guests take a breath and be present as they return to their daily responsibilities. You can do this by making a statement at the end of the event that connects to themes from the beginning, signalling it's come full circle and time to say goodbye.

11 simple ways to bond with the people in your life. Read More

A new book unveils some ways to quiet your inner critic and combat social anxiety. Read More

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How intentional gatherings can deepen our connections with loved ones, and make routine events fun again.

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"In her long and extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson has not only succeeded as an actor, she has shaped the course of history." -President Barack Obama, 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony

"Just as I Am is my truth. It is me, plain and unvarnished, with the glitter and garland set aside. In these pages, I am indeed Cicely, the actress who has been blessed to grace the stage and screen for six decades. Yet I am also the church girl who once rarely spoke a word. I am the teenager who sought solace in the verses of the old hymn for which this book is named. I am a daughter and a mother, a sister and a friend. I am an observer of human nature and the dreamer of audacious dreams. I am a woman who has hurt as immeasurably as I have loved, a child of God divinely guided by his hand. And here in my ninth decade, I am a woman who, at long last, has something meaningful to say." - Cicely Tyson

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"In her long and extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson has not only succeeded as an actor, she has shaped the course of history." -President Barack Obama, 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony "Just as I Am is my truth. It is me, plain and unvarnished, with the glitt

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Michele Harper author of The Beauty in Breaking, a NYT Bestseller

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Michele Harper, an emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself, in her memoir, The Beauty in Breaking.

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My Life, My Love, My Legacy is the life story of Coretta Scott King as she told it the Rev. Dr. Barabara Reynolds towards the end of her life. In this posthumous memoir, we get to see Coretta's story-not just Mrs. King's.

The story begins with Coretta's life as a young, determined girl growing up in rural Alabama. Her house was burned to the ground when she was fifteen, and she watched her parents' "internal fortitude" as they dealt with the terrorist acts taking place in the Deep South. The strength of her father and the discernment of her mother during this time shaped her into the woman she became.

There are so many different insights into her life and the King family, including, but not limited to:

Her dreams to pursue a professional singing career

She was in a serious relationship with a Jewish man in college but felt stymied at the thought of the many barriers they would cross as a married interracial couple

She wasn't really into MLK when she first met him

The effect that death had on her young children

How she created her "fifth child"-the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change

Her opinion on Rev. Jesse Jackson

Other interesting things you'll have to read to find out 🙂

The book was so full of gems that I had to grab a pen and underline quotes.

Notable Quotes
"I was brought up in the southern tradition "Before I was married to Martin and became a King, I was a proud Scott..." "Most [men] thought that women should stay in the shadows; however, I felt that, as women, we had much to contribute... I believed that women should allow our essence and presence to shine, rather than letting ourselves be buried or shunted to the sidelines." "I saw a premise working that I didn't like but had learned to accept: often you can go out on a limb, and when you're attacked, few people will come to your rescue if it means crawling out on a limb with you." "I want people to know that I was committed to leaving an eternal flame, built on love, that would never be extinguished." and was taught to have manners, to be ladylike and polite. That, however, did not mean allowing other people to walk all over me or treat me like a wallflower."
This is a truly touching story because it's not just about Coretta, it's from Coretta's point of view-it is her voice. I enjoyed reading this book and learning more about the woman so many have looked up to. It's a memoir I'm likely to pick up again.

Disclaimer: I received an advanced reader copy of this book from the author/publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Kyndal Wilson

Kyndal is a free spirit who is convinced she lived in Paris during the 1920's in a past life. Tea Snob. Gastronome. Wordsmith. Proud Ravenclaw. Sucker for a period drama. History, Fantasy, & Book Blerd. Professional Daydreamer. Cursed with Wanderlust. Obsessed with Hamilton (the musical). Always on the advent of her next adventure. You can follow her on Twitter: @ladykyndal and/or Instagram: @ladykyndal

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'My Life, My Love, My Legacy' by Coretta Scott King

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My Life, My Love, My Legacy is the life story of Coretta Scott King as she told it the Rev. Dr. Barabara Reynolds towards the end of her life. In this posthumous memoir, we get to see Coretta's story--not just Mrs. King's.

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Kiese Laymon's Heavy provides a searing reminder of how all of us are harmed by the violence, racism, and toxic masculinity upon which the United States is built. The book's subtitle, An American Memoir, is apt: Sharing stories from his own life, Laymon is able to convey major truths about how this country functions and the casualties it creates.

"America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts," he reflects. Heavy is a book unlike any I had read before, both in its revelations and Laymon's evocative, enjoyable prose.

Centered on Laymon's home state of Mississippi and his relationships with himself and his loved ones, Heavy delves into themes of bodies, weight, race, racism, sexual violence, physical abuse, and intergenerational trauma. The memoir invites us to grapple with how we as members of U.S. society have internalized the values upholding this country's social hierarchy, and how that internalization can spur us to harm others, especially those we love. Importantly, Heavy also pushes us to think about how we harm ourselves as we consume and reproduce American culture.

Heavy opens by complicating dominant notions of the causes of American suffering. Much of the book is narrated through Laymon's interactions with his mom and grandma, two Southern Black women who raised him and developed his consciousness. While he is awed by their strength and grateful for their love, Laymon also investigates how his matriarchs have internalized and perpetuated some of the violence and apathy they inherited as Americans. In so doing, he demonstrates that harm inflicted on an individual by American society does not necessarily translate to the will to do the deep internal work to reject its core values.

In the opening chapter, Laymon recalls a difficult conversation in which he tried to get his grandmother to reflect on her trauma from growing up in the Jim Crow South and the sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of white and Black men.

"This summer, it took one final conversation with Grandmama for me to understand that no one in our family-and very few folk in this nation-has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we've been, which means no one in our family-and very few folk in this nation-wants to be free," he states.

Laymon shows how the violence at the core of U.S. society can permeate all our interactions, if we let it. Instead of focusing on the broad structures that uphold white supremacist patriarchy, Laymon is able to show how these systems infiltrate our ways of seeing ourselves and being in the world. He recounts how, as he starved himself and pushed his body past its breaking point, his colleagues and loved ones responded with admiration for how he made his body conform to norms of what successful people look like. All they saw was a successful young Black man who made it from the South to be a professor at one of the nation's elite East Coast institutions. Through his memories, Laymon shows readers some of the ways in which marginalized populations are not exempt from America's harmful ideology:

I wanted the book to begin and end with the assumption that if white Americans reckoned with their insatiable appetites for black American suffering, and we reckoned with our insatiable appetites for unhealthy food, we could all be ushered into a reformed era of American prosperity .... I wanted to write a lie.

Heavy focuses on Laymon's own experiences with Blackness and masculinity and challenges readers to rethink what those identities mean. White readers can take inspiration to examine how white supremacy and patriarchy inform how we operate in the world-not only in more obvious iterations through being racist or being beneficiaries of unjust spoils-but how we actually dehumanize ourselves and those we care about most using these logics consciously or unconsciously.

One of Heavy 's major themes is lying. "Our dishonesty, cowardice and misplaced self-righteousness, far more than how much, or how little we weigh, is part of why we are suffering. In this way, and far too many others, we are studious children of this nation," he states.

For Laymon, telling lies was a tool for objectifying himself to fit into a picture of "success" in American society, and for controlling and manipulating others, especially women. Much of the dishonesty in the book is shown through Laymon's complex relationship with his mother, a professor who instilled in him the skills to be a pathbreaking writer and to love and mentor Black students in Mississippi, but also beat him severely throughout his childhood and manipulated him into handing over large portions of his income to fuel her gambling addiction. In turn, Laymon also manipulated and lied to his mother and other women who were central to his life.

Talking about his mother, Laymon writes:

Every time I lied, I wanted to control you, control your memory of us, control your vision of me. I was afraid to talk about being emotionally abusive, about gorging, about starving, about gambling all my money away, about wanting to disappear .... I didn't think there was any way you could love me if I really showed you more of who, and what, and where I'd been. So I did what we do. I told you the truth about white folks' treatment of me without being honest about how I treated myself and others close to me while surviving that treatment.

Much of Laymon's self-examination is shown through his relationship with his body. The book is punctuated by measurements-how much Laymon weighed and his percentage of body fat at different points in his life. Through narrating his body's journey from its heaviest weight to its lightest and back again, he provides insight into how obsession with thinness and being "in shape" are rarely connected to well-being. Our consumerist culture pathologizes those who are heavier but assumes thin or buff individuals are happy and healthy. Laymon demonstrates that our bodies don't always reflect internal health, and that many thin people also have troubled relationships with food, exercise, and self-esteem.

Before Heavy, I don't recall reading a book where a cis man was so honest about the pervasiveness of misogyny and rape culture, and how these hurt men in addition to women and nonbinary people. His deep consideration of the issue contrasts with many men's lip-service accounts of being feminists. Heavy reveals how rape culture is reproduced through men's silences as well as the lessons men and women teach one another implicitly or explicitly. "I never heard the words 'sexual violence' or 'violent sex' or 'sexual abuse' from one family member, one teacher, or one preacher but my body knew sexual violence and violent sex were as wrong as anything police or white folk could do to us," he states.

In the wake of the rise of the #MeToo movement, many men have claimed to be surprised by the extent to which women are affected by rape culture. In Heavy, Laymon describes witnessing a coercive sexual encounter at the age of 12 between a 15-year-old girl and older teenage boys, along with his own sexual abuse and that of the women in his family.

He reveals that boys and men do know about the pervasiveness of sexual violence and make a choice to participate in it or do nothing about it. When talking about Layla, his friend who was pressured into having sex with older boys so she could swim in their pool, Laymon writes, "I was taught by big boys who were taught by big boys who were taught by big boys that black girls would be okay no matter what we did to them .... I stood there wondering why the shallow grunts and minisqeaks coming from the boys in Daryl's room made me want to be dead." Laymon also includes the fact that he didn't confront the boys about their actions or take steps to make sure Layla got the support she needed, but rather went home and waited for his mom.

Through being honest about some of the ways he hurt women, Laymon exposes the subtler harms of toxic masculinity. This is revealed through his internal response when a girl he had a crush on in high school shared with him her experiences of sexual abuse:

The night Kamala Lackey told me her secrets, I promised I'd never sexually violate or sexually abuse any woman or girl on earth. The existence of that promise was enough to excuse myself for lying to Abby Claremont and any other girl who wanted to have sex with me. I was sixteen years old. I'd become something far more violent than a Hulk. I was a liar, a cheater, a manipulator, a fat, happysad, bald-headed black boy with a heart murmur, and according to you and the white girl I lied to every day, I was a good dude.

Heavy does not provide clear-cut answers or the satisfying resolution I wanted. My own hope for a happy ending may speak to the unrealistic fairy tales that our societal narratives tell us are just around the corner, despite all the devastating factors that Laymon unmasks as undermining health and happiness for most Americans.

Rather than extending the false promise of the American Dream, what Heavy offers is a vulnerable narrative that exposes realities many people would rather not share with those closest to them, let alone the general public. It is a brave and beautiful account that dares readers to think about how to recognize and reduce the small, everyday violences that are our national inheritance, and hopefully how we can become more human in the process.

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In Kiese Laymon's 'Heavy,' the Crushing Weight of America's Destructive Appetites - Rewire News Group

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Kiese Laymon's Heavy provides a searing reminder of how all of us are harmed by the violence, racism, and toxic masculinity upon which the United States is built. The book's subtitle, An American Memoir, is apt: Sharing stories from his own life, Laymon is able to convey major truths about how this country functions and the casualties it creates.

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Colson Whitehead is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Underground Railroad, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, he lives in New York City.

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The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

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Colson Whitehead is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Underground Railroad, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, he lives in New York City.

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A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history's great epics: the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present-edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.
The story begins in 1619-a year before the Mayflower-when the White Lion disgorges "some 20-and-odd Negroes" onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history.

Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume "community" history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, eighty of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span with ten lyrical interludes from poets. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith-instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness.

This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.

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A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history's great epics: the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present-edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.

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"A moving and perceptive survey of landmarks that reckon, or fail to reckon, with the legacy of slavery in America... this is an essential consideration of how America's past informs its present."―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[A] devastating portrait with unforgettable details...a brilliant, vital work about 'a crime that is still unfolding.'"―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"[A] powerful and diligent exploration of the realities and ongoing consequences of slavery in America."―Booklist (starred review)

"Clint Smith's gifts as both a poet and a scholar make How the Word Is Passed a richly provocative read about places where the story of American slavery lives on...[it] succeeds in making the essential distinction between history and nostalgia."-Bookpage (starred review)

Poet and journalist Clint Smith's debut examines the legacy of slavery in modern America...bringing the past into light with lyrical mastery." -

Smith reveals and makes present for his readers the profoundly disturbing truths of what transpired in these places, of the systemic and strategic violence and abuse that enabled the society in which we now live... The book doesn't simply bring news of the past; it seeks to convey the urgency of that news in our troubled present." -

"Smith tells his stories with the soul of a poet and the heart of an educator. Smith's ambitious book is fueled by a humble sense of duty: he sought the wisdom of those who tell of slavery's legacy "outside traditional classrooms and beyond the pages of textbooks"; public historians who "have dedicated their lives to sharing this history with others." Smith channels the spirit of Toni Morrison here; the writer as one to pass on the word so that it is never forgotten."―The Millions

"Smith forces us to reconsider what we think we know about American history."―Time

"Clint Smith chronicles in vivid and meditative prose his travels to historical sites that are truth-telling or deceiving visitors about slavery. Humans enslaved Black people, and then too often enslaved history. But How the Word Is Passed frees history, frees humanity to reckon honestly with the legacy of slavery. We need this book." ―Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning

"In this stunning book, Clint Smith takes readers on a necessary journey. Like the best of the tour guides he meets, he tells us the truth with conviction and compassion, and he has much to teach, both about the history of slavery across America and about how to pass the word on." ―W. Caleb McDaniel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sweet Taste of Liberty

"A work of moral force and humility, How the Word is Passed offers a compelling account of the history and memory of slavery in America. Writing from Confederate Army cemeteries, former plantations, modern-day prisons, and other historical sites, Clint Smith moves seamlessly between past and present, revealing how slavery is remembered and misremembered-and why it matters. Engaging and wise, this book combines history and reportage, poem and memoir. It is a deep lesson and a reckoning."―Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Evicted

"A beautifully written, evocative, and timely meditation on the way slavery is commemorated in the United States." ―Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello

"Clint Smith has given us a new lens for seeing the spaces we inhabit, the stories they tell, and the people who tell those stories. How the Word is Passed sheds light on the contested narratives beneath the surface of our collective national identity, inviting us to dig a little deeper, reminding us never to take received histories for granted."―Eve L. Ewing, author of 1919 and Ghosts in the Schoolyard

"There is perhaps no greater challenge than convincing a nation to remember what it would rather choose to forget. Clint Smith, one of our most thoughtful writers and thinkers, skillfully documents how echoes of enslavement remain everywhere... How the Word Is Passed is a vital, desperately-needed contribution to that reckoning."―Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of They Can't Kill Us All

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New Book: How the Word Is Passed - Clint Smith

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Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks-those that are honest about the past and those that are not-that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective his

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A path to educational justice for all students - one that encourages teachers, parents, and their communities to adopt the rebellious spirit and bold and creative methods of abolitionists Educator Bettina Love argues that the U.S educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering ... ( of children of color. Reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education which she calls the Education Survival Complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom--not reform--educators, parents, and community leaders must approach education through the imagination, determination, boldness and urgency of an abolitionist. Drawing on her experiences as a student and teacher, Love highlights young community leaders, artists and activists who are advocating for social change and inclusion. She persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She concludes by showing how young leaders are expanding our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice by using the playbook of abolitionists like Ella Barker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer. more)

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A path to educational justice for all students - one that encourages teachers, parents, and their communities to adopt the rebellious spirit and bold and creative methods of abolitionists Educator Bettina Love argues that the U.S educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education which she calls the Education Survival Complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom--not reform--educators, parents, and community leaders must approach education through the imagination, determination, boldness and urgency of an abolitionist. Drawing on her experiences as a student and teacher, Love highlights young community leaders, artists and activists who are advocating for social change and inclusion. She persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She concludes by showing how young leaders are expanding our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice by using the playbook of abolitionists like Ella Barker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

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all about we want to do more than survive: abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom by bettina love

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We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina Love

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https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2020/01/review-such-fun-age-kiley-reid/604552/

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The title of Kiley Reid's debut, Such a Fun Age, works on so many levels it makes me giddy - and, what's better, the title's plurality of meaning is echoed all over the place within the novel, where both plot and dialogue are layered with history, prejudice, expectations, and assumptions. The title's "fun age" might refer to one of the two main characters, Emira Tucker, a 25-year-old black woman who keenly feels that working part-time as a babysitter and part-time as a typist doesn't count as true adulting. It might refer to her charge, Briar, a white three-year-old whose imagination and speech patterns are so charmingly true to a particular kind of kid that she's both instantly recognizable and entirely her own person.

More broadly, the "fun age" might be our own, prior to the 2016 election - an age that was considered by some to be magically post-racist and post-sexist because it was impolite to be these things in public; an age of performative white feminism; an age of social media and virality and armchair activism and online virtue-signaling that ironically requires certain people - often, those already more vulnerable - to exist in specific politically correct ways while letting others - usually, those with power and privilege - off the hook. Don't let all these layers put you off - the wonder of Such a Fun Age is that it is also a page-turner with beautifully drawn characters and a riveting plot.

In the book's opening chapter, Emira is called away from a friend's birthday party by Alix ("uh- leeks") Chamberlain, whose two daughters, Briar and infant Catherine, she babysits for several times a week. Someone has thrown an egg at the Chamberlain house, hard enough to shatter a window, and Alix wants Briar out of the house when the police arrive. Emira, both somewhat tired of the party and in need of the extra cash, takes Briar to a grocery store in the Chamberlains' neighborhood, her friend Zara tagging along. She, Emira, and Briar have an impromptu dance party in the frozen foods aisle, as one occasionally will when a toddler is around, before Zara heads off for a hookup.

The lovely, upbeat scene collapses when a security guard approaches and starts interrogating Emira because a white woman, who only moments before was congenially laughing at the dancing trio, was concerned to see a black woman with a white child out so late. "We just came here to look at nuts. Well, we don't touch them or anything. We're just... we're really into nuts right now, so... yeah," Emira tells the guard, but the situation escalates to the point where a white man starts capturing the verbal altercation with his phone ("Can you step off?" Emira asks him; "I think you're gonna want this filmed," he says.) and Emira has to call Peter Chamberlain to come and reassure the guard. "He's an old white guy," she says, "so I'm sure everyone will feel better." She's right; they do.

Over the course of the following months, the tensions between Emira and the Chamberlains rise due to several factors that have very little to do with Emira herself. Alix, the novel's other main character - and foil, and sometimes antagonist - is a semi-successful businesswoman who has made a career out of writing letters requesting free stuff from companies and getting what she asks for. She also breastfed Briar while speaking at a panel once, an act of have-it-all-feminism that garnered lots of attention. What happened to Emira at the store has Alix consumed with (white) guilt, especially since the egg thrown through the window came with a cry of "racist," aimed at Peter, a news anchor, who said, during a feel-good human interest segment earlier that night, that he hoped a black boy taking a white girl to Homecoming had "asked her father first."

This is a book that will read, I suspect, quite differently to various audiences - funny to some, deeply uncomfortable and shamefully recognizable to others.

Emira and Alix have as much distance between them in terms of class as race. Emira comes from a working class family of driven, creative people, which is part of why she feels especially weird that she isn't ambitious in a particular direction. Alix's parents became very suddenly wealthy when she was a teenager, inducting her into a nouveau riche lifestyle she had no idea how to handle and which she is still uncomfortable with, despite having leaned further and further into upper-middle class affluence over the years. But what the two women do share - not in the way you'd expect - is Kelley Copeland, the tall, handsome, and seemingly woke white guy who thought Emira would want her encounter filmed.

To share more of the plot would be to spoil the fun, as it were. This is a book that will read, I suspect, quite differently to various audiences - funny to some, deeply uncomfortable and shamefully recognizable to others - but whatever the experience, I urge you to read Such a Fun Age. Let its empathic approach to even the ickiest characters stir you, allow yourself to share Emira's millennial anxieties about adulting, take joy in the innocence of Briar's still-unmarred personhood, and rejoice that Kiley Reid is only just getting started.

Ilana Masad is an Israeli-American fiction writer, critic, and founder/host of the podcast The Other Stories. Her debut novel, All My Mother's Lovers, is forthcoming from Dutton in 2020.

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'Such A Fun Age' Is A Complex, Layered Page-Turner

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The title of Kiley Reid's debut, Such a Fun Age, works on so many levels it makes me giddy - and, what's better, the title's plurality of meaning is echoed all over the place within the novel, where both plot and dialogue are layered with history, prejudice, expectations, and assumptions.

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The revised edition of LONG DIVISION by Kiese Laymon was named a best-of book for summer 2021 by Elle Magazine. They praise: "HEAVY memoirist Kiese Laymon returns, this time with a fiercely creative novel combining time travel with institutionalized racism. The resulting saga winds from the 1980s to the 1960s and beyond, weaving a fractured but fascinating path through Black America." Scribner published the novel on June 1, 2021.

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The revised edition of LONG DIVISION by Kiese Laymon was named a best-of book for summer 2021 by Elle Magazine. They praise: "HEAVY memoirist Kiese Laymon returns, this time with a fiercely creative novel combining time travel with institutionalized racism.

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I want to ask you about your new book, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Talk about this coming together of movements.

Well, oftentimes there are historical conjunctures that one cannot necessarily predict, but they're moments when things come together in such a way that new possibilities arrive. And I think that when the Ferguson protesters refused to go home after protesting for two or three days, when they insisted on continuing that protest, and when they were-when Palestine activists, Palestinian activists in Palestine, were the first to actually tweet solidarity and support for them, that opened up a whole new realm. I don't know whether many people are aware of the extent to which Palestinian-American activists were involved, from the very outset, in the protest against the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson. But it has been absolutely inspiring to watch the development of young activists. And I have to catch myself when I say the, you know, "youth movements" and "black youth movements." I have to catch myself and recognize that these are the movements of our time. They're not youth movements per se, because youth have always led radical movements. But it's very exciting to live during this era. And as I've pointed out many times, I think it must be extremely exciting to be young now. But it's also exciting for those of us who are older to see this promise that has emerged in such powerful ways for the first time since perhaps the '60s and the '70s.

Angela Davis, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her latest book, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. When we come back, we'll talk with Angela Davis about President Obama's trip to Cuba and Assata Shakur. Stay with us.

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Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Angela Davis on Ferguson, Palestine & the Foundations of a Movement

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In a Women's History Month special, we speak with author, activist and scholar Angela Davis, professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her latest book is titled "Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement," a collection of essays, interviews and speeches that highlight the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

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Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is artist on the brink of an exciting career. They are settling into the routine of their life together, when they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy's time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy's conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

This stirring love story is a deeply insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward- with hope and pain- into the future.

"It's among Tayari's many gifts that she can touch us soul to soul with her words."
- OPRAH WINFREY

"Tayari Jones is blessed with vision to see through to the surprising and devastating truths at the heart of ordinary lives, strength to wrest those truths free, and a gift of language to lay it all out, compelling and clear. That has been true from her very first book, but with An American Marriage that vision, that strength and that truth-telling voice have found a new level of artistry and power."
-MICHAEL CHABON, author of Moonglow: A Novel

"I love An American Marriage and I'm so excited for this book to be in the world. Tayari's novel is timely, thoughtful, and beautifully written. Reading it, I found myself angry as hell, laughing out loud, choking up and cheering. A gem of a book."
-JACQUELINE WOODSON, author of Brown Girl Dreaming

"Tayari Jones is a great storyteller. An American Marriage holds the reader from first page to last, with her compassionate observation, her clear-eyed insight and her beautifully written and complex characters. Jones understands love and loss and writes with passion and precision about the forces that move us all from one to another."
-AMY BLOOM, bestselling author of Lucky Us

"An American Marriage asks hard questions about injustice and betrayal, and answers them with a heartbreaking and genuinely suspenseful love story in which nobody's wrong and everybody's wounded. Tayari Jones has written a complex and important novel about people trapped in a tragic situation, struggling to reconcile their responsibilities and desires."
-TOM PERROTTA, author of The Leftovers

"Tayari Jones' American Marriage is a stunning epic love story filled with breathtaking twists and turns, while bursting with realized and unrealized dreams. Skillfully crafted and beautifully written, American Marriage is an exquisite, timely, and powerful novel that feels both urgent and indispensable."
-EDWIDGE DANTICAT, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory
Available At:

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Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is artist on the brink of an exciting career.

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Excerpt
Dare to Want More
I sit in the living room, a cozy space, warm in the early summer. I am perched on the edge of the sofa next to Valerie, the home's owner, a lovely black woman in her late forties. Across from us, seated close together on a wide settee meant for one, are her two children, a son and a daughter.

Politicians rarely visit their streets, which are nestled in a poorer community in south Georgia. Valerie beams with pride that both her children are headed to college in the fall. David, seventeen, plans to study criminology. Maya, eighteen, her belly round with her first child, intends to become a middle school teacher. Both newly graduated from high school, Maya will give birth in mere weeks and begin college months later, an unwed teen mother. Her intended school is more than three hours north of her home, so her mother will raise her newborn baby while she starts her freshman year.

Valerie speaks matter-of-factly about the coming challenge: raising a new child just as hers leave the nest. Still, she is determined that both her children pursue degrees she never received. Maya, the mother-to-be, wonders aloud how she'll do so far away from home and her baby. Yet in the next breath, she explains how college will be best for her and her child. Their future success rests upon her.

I've come to their home as part of my campaign for governor, so I ask Valerie what she expects of someone like me. What can I do to help make lives like hers better? In her soft voice, she replies she just wants better options for financial aid for her children. They will succeed, she says, if they can afford to stay in school.

As I look around the modest home, passed down through generations, I understand both the pride and the desperation tangled in her response. She got them through and has given them the tools to carve out better lives for themselves. We chat more about the worries she's lived with all those years, our discussion turning to the crime and poverty in their community.

Then I ask Valerie what she wants. At first, all I get in response is a quizzical look that suggests I need to reconsider my bid for higher office. I repeat, "What do you want? For you? What secret dream do you have for yourself?" Her confused expression turns to one of surprise. "I don't know," she tells me. "I've been a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly for twenty years."

"You must want something," I probe, "something you'd like to do for you."

"A day care," she admits quietly. "I'd like to start a day care for unwed mothers, like my daughter. So more girls can finish school and pursue their dreams." But that ambition is beyond her-her body language, her tone of voice, her averted gaze speak louder than her words. I press her, but she demurs with a smile. "Let's just see what happens if you win the governor's job."

Valerie's house in south Georgia is not too different from the squat redbrick house where I grew up on South Street in Gulfport, Mississippi. An oak tree grew in our front yard, shadowing the front sidewalk, forbidding grass to grow beneath its shade. Pink azaleas bloomed each spring from bushes that flanked the front door. Our rented house, and the others set close by, teemed with children-all black, all working-class. We played in our postage-stamp yards, make-believing the fantastical. Superhero exploits. Cops and robbers. As we got older, we'd talk about moving to New Orleans or living in one of the mansions along the beachfront that lay less than five miles away, across the railroad tracks that ran in between our neighborhood and the wealthier environs. We dreamed of more, while our parents' lives centered around survival and making it from paycheck to paycheck. Instinctively, we understood that more had to be possible, even if we didn't know what to do to get there. These imaginings-these desires-are the root of ambition.

As adults, like Valerie, we tend to edit our desires until they fit our construction of who we're supposed to become. In such a world, I wouldn't dare dream of running for higher office, for mayor or governor or president. At least for now, Valerie sees herself retiring in twenty more years from the Piggly Wiggly as a cashier, rather than as a small business owner who helps a community raise its children. From our brief meeting, I could see she had the fire, albeit at a low burn, of a minority leader. She had ambition. She had a vision. But she didn't have the faith. And understandably so.

Whether we come from working-class neighborhoods or grow up comfortably middle-class, minorities rarely come of age explicitly thinking about what we want and how to get it. People already in power almost never have to think about whether they belong in the room, much less if they would be listened to once inside. These men-and they are usually men and typically white-do not have to grapple with low expectations based on gender or race or class. Ambition for them begins with reminiscences of old times and older friendships or newer alliances. The ends have already been decided, with only the means to be discussed.

Most potential minority leaders feel the same lack of faith Valerie had, at least at some point in their evolution. We may not know how to get the first job, let alone make it to the big chair. We don't know how to take the leap from accepting our fates to actually changing them, and not just a little, but radically. Then there are those who simply do not know what they want. The drive to achieve burns inside, often without a clear target.

We want to "be something," but what that is remains hazy. Often, we cannot articulate our goals because they lie just beyond the reach of who we are supposed to be. Ambition's scale is irrelevant. What holds us back is not scope. It's fear.

And because we don't know what to call our dreams, don't know how to make them happen, or are pretty sure we'll be disappointed, we just stand still. But becoming a minority leader demands that we embrace ambition as our due.

In every sector where I've worked, I am driven by my ambition to encourage others to find their own dreams and exploit their potential. Whether I'm mentoring young people in organizations or speaking with those looking to forge new careers at midlife to explore their potential, the starting block is knowing what you want-and then wanting more. Run for office, take the helm at corporate boards, go back to college, or start a small business. Whatever the path, this book is designed to help locate our ambition and use it to create a path to leadership that does not bow to inner doubts or outside prejudices.

Getting Lost in Possibilities

During law school, one of my tax professors, Anne Alstott, hired me as a research assistant for a book she was coauthoring. As I combed through the reams of documents, I struggled to organize them into coherent and useful information. I tried to categorize by theme, by type, even by the size of the page, legal or standard. Lost in the sheer enormity of the project, I couldn't determine what was real and relevant versus what were merely interesting facts on a page.

When I presented my initial findings to Professor Alstott, she listened thoughtfully, asking the occasional question. At the end, she motioned me over to the whiteboard in her overstuffed office filled with books and monographs, and she told me the secret of how she approached research. Finding the truth requires three simple questions, she explained, and they must be answered in any investigation: (1) What is the problem? (2) Why is it a problem? (3) How do you solve it?

Finding, owning, and living one's ambition can feel a lot like that research project. In a world filled with options, we are paralyzed by choices. Or, worse, in so many cases, when we've been told our options are limited, we need to have the wherewithal to find our way to more. Rather than seeking outside expertise on whether we deserve what we want, we must look inward, not simply at our fears-of losing, of not being sufficient-but at the great difference living our ambitions can make if we succeed.

When we win, we achieve beyond ourselves. We become models for others, known and unknown, who see our victories as proof that they can win too. Even by simply embracing ambition, talking about it, trying and failing, we mentor others to see their potential. And by going beyond our own limits, we change the places we inhabit. We bring a fresh perspective to a company or a cause, a minority lens that expands and shifts how the work gets done. This is not news. Think of the companies scrambling to add women to their executive offices, people of color to their boards of directors. Or the nonprofit that adapts its mission because of the unique understanding it gains from incorporating the experience of those who have been outside.

When I work with young people and others seeking leadership positions, they are primed to jump to the third question, to the how of it, without understanding the what or the why. Some pick a place they want to land or a title they like and then expect teleportation. It may sound corny, but so many of us forget that finding and fulfilling ambition is truly a journey, and one that does not come with a map or GPS, especially for those of us on the outside looking to get in. The effort can be sweaty, teary, and messy as much as it can be rewarding and empowering. I call it the hard work of becoming more.

So what takes us beyond the dream to charting a new reality? What I've come to think of as Alstott's Queries, framed slightly differently, have become a cornerstone of how I frame almost every endeavor. Whether the dream is to run a company, run for office, or run a 5K-or even if your dream has not yet been discovered-the path to realizing ambition is the same:

1. What do I want?

2. Why do I want it?

3. How do I get there?

Before exploring these steps, it's crucial to understand and internalize our very right to even be ambitious. Because, for too many of us, we are stopped in our tracks before we begin because we don't believe we deserve to want more. And it is by wanting more that we begin.

I Know You Are, But What Am I

Early on, I had two experiences that helped me understand how to convert imaginings into ambition and realize that "too big" isn't a good reason not to try. The first occurred at the end of my junior year of high school. My public high school required all juniors to take the PSAT. Despite not having the tutors like some of my school friends, I'm a pretty good test taker and did well. My scores prompted an invitation to apply for a program I'd never heard of before-nor had any of my teachers. Still, I completed the extensive application for the Telluride Foundation because it promised a summer program away from home, and I thought it would be exciting to go to the north. I applied, and they selected me to attend TASP, which stands for Telluride Association Summer Program, a nerd summer camp for high achievers. I took the second plane ride of my life to Ithaca, New York, where I lived with fifteen of the smartest teenagers I'd ever met. For the first few days, I studiously avoided conversation, baffled by how I had been chosen to join them.

To a person, I could not compete. I wrote poetry for our high school journal. A girl there had published a collection. One was a concert-level violinist, and the others sounded like college professors. In our classroom sessions, I was called upon to answer questions, and I got more answers wrong than I ever had at Avondale High School. The other students referenced books I'd never read and scholars I hadn't heard of. Even casual conversation left me adrift, floundering to understand cultural references far beyond me. When I dared to introduce television into the mix, you'd have thought I cussed.

At the end of the first week, I called home, begging my parents to let me leave. I was out of my depth among these brainiacs, embarrassing myself every day. My parents, cruelly it seemed, refused. They demanded that I stay and learn as much as I could from the experience. My dad told me to get comfortable with not being anywhere near the smartest person in the room. I had to accept that I simply did not have the background or education the others did, and it was up to me to decide if that mattered.

The comment stung, but he was right. I had always been smart, but I needed to test myself against those who were smarter, more talented, and more accomplished. My ability to dream meant hearing about, and entering, worlds far different from my own. Athletes are encouraged to test themselves against better players. Proverbs tells us that iron sharpens iron. So too does ambition sharpen ambition. Dreams hone other dreams.

I stayed for the full summer, never once proving myself superior to anyone. Six weeks could not erase the difference in upbringing and access. But I learned from them, in our classes and beyond. I learned to mimic their sense of self-confidence and certainty. I didn't lie about what I knew, but I began to carry myself differently and speak with more authority.

Not everyone's ambitions will be world domination or Carnegie Hall, but we should be driven beyond what we know and feel safe doing. Ambition means pushing past simply what we are good at. The goal is to stretch ourselves, to explore our potential, even when we know we won't be first or the best. I sometimes advise people to watch what they fear, what makes them most nervous or feel the most self-protective-sometimes fear masks ambition. And unmasking it can unleash your drive.

Telluride introduced me to a world larger than my own, and then came Spelman College. A historically black college with a student body composed of 99 percent African American women, missionaries founded Spelman to help freed slave women embrace their liberty. Spelman operates as a four-year course on deprogramming black women stereotypes-the welfare queen, the hypersexualized Jezebel, being the lowest rung of the minority hierarchy-replaced by a parade of chief executive officers, public intellectuals, scientists, artists, and actors.

My mother tricked me into attending Spelman. A lifelong Southerner, I'd planned my escape by applying only to schools north of the Mason-Dixon Line. I had no interest in a women's college-a black one at that. Most of my classmates since kindergarten had been white students. Plus, as I hadn't been allowed to date until I was sixteen, the idea of a cloistered college experience held no appeal. But Mom guilted me into applying, reminding me that she hadn't had the opportunity to attend due to her family's poverty. When I was admitted, she convinced me to take advantage of a day off from school to visit. I found myself astonished by the incredible diversity of a black women's college, a stone's throw away from a black men's college, Morehouse College. In the end, my visit persuaded me to add Spelman to the list of colleges I might attend. I put the names into a cup: Spelman, Swarthmore, Sarah Lawrence, and Vassar. Spelman came out three times, and I sent in my acceptance.

At Spelman, I had the second experience that moved me closer to knowing what I wanted for my future. Suddenly, I found myself seeing how much blacks could achieve, beyond the handful of television shows I'd watched. My new classmates were the daughters of politicians and famous lawyers and corporate leaders. One of my closest friends mentioned in passing that she had the U.S. surgeon general's home number. While several of us came from more modest means, our college expected us to dream beyond our narrow understanding of what we could be. I threw myself into college life, hungry to become this new superwoman: the Breaker of Stereotypes, Destroyer of Black Woman Myths. I was now in a context that included people of color, women no less, who had confidence that they could succeed.

I learned at Telluride and Spelman that I was allowed to craft my future. Those experiences had quelled some of my self-doubt; but even then, I pretended to be more fearless than I felt. I tried out for the spring play, despite my personal worries that I wasn't as sylphlike as my castmates. I ran for vice president of the Student Government Association as a sophomore, clearly lacking the years of experience my predecessors and my opponent had. I persevered and won, despite my shortcomings and despite my own inner doubts, which I managed to keep at bay, though just barely.

This is where Alstott's Queries, the what, why, and how, become most critical. Once we accept that we deserve to want more and we understand how giving birth to ambition requires knowing ourselves better, we're ready to actually start figuring out what lights us up and then plotting out our pathways to get it.

What's Love Got to Do with It

When I was eighteen, I spent an evening in our college computer lab, the fluorescent lights crackling overhead reflecting off the near-green screen. While the few other students there on a weeknight likely toiled over papers, I'd been driven from my dorm room by what felt like an urgent project. In the lab that night, I created a spreadsheet. The Lotus 1-2-3 document laid out my life plans for the next forty years. Seriously.

As a teenager, I'd read about John D. Rockefeller, who'd kept careful lists of each goal and painstakingly mapped every moment of his life. Since he'd gone on to become one of the wealthiest men in the world, the idea of writing down my lofty goals struck me as the right approach. The act also allowed me to plan rather than act, to set future goals and avoid hard choices in the here and now. Whether scribbled into diaries or typed onto a computer, the act of writing down what I wanted became an ego's Christmas list. Lots of stuff that you know Santa will never deliver.

I hadn't come to the computer lab because of a sudden burst of inspiration. Quite the contrary-my heart had been broken. Chad, the second boy I'd ever dated, decided to end our relationship. As he pointed out in painstaking detail, I had not been a good girlfriend. He told me I had no passion, no capacity for love beyond my pursuits. Between student government and the spring play and classes, I'd not invested as much time in the actual work of our relationship. To be honest, I spared our relationship less attention because I didn't know how to do it well. Extracurricular experiences seemed much easier than navigating the emotions of romance. As aggressive as I could be in secular pursuits, affairs of the heart perplexed me, and I focused on what I understood.

Still, when he broke up with me, my confidence shattered. All around me, young men and women managed to effectively date one another. My abject failure-and I believed at the time it was all mine-surely signaled only one truth: I should focus on my professional life.

Fueled by sorrow and outrage, I decided to map out my life that night. A cold, comforting spreadsheet seemed to be the best way to focus on what I was good at, particularly by Chad's estimation. The sheet contained four columns: year, age, job, and tasks. And they represented very different facets of myself. I was determined to embrace them all.

I intended at age twenty-four to write a best-selling spy novel like the stories I'd been captivated by in the Bond movies and on General Hospital. I'd organized my college class schedule around the exploits of Anna Devane and Robert Scorpio, denizens of the fictional town of Port Charles and spies for the WSB, the World Security Bureau. Despite watching these shows since childhood, and every Bond movie, none of the characters on my beloved soap looked like me, and precious few blockbuster thriller novels had black women on their covers. My mother, a librarian for most of my childhood, had taught us how books shaped our sense of the possible. For me, for other young black girls, I wanted to write books that showed them to be as adventurous and attractive as any white woman.

By thirty, I would be a millionaire running a corporation whose purpose I had not yet figured out. Having grown up as working poor, I decided having money was next. With my new wealth, I would help my parents buy their first house, a Kennedyesque compound on the shores of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Like the perennial winners in the Publishers Clearing House commercials, I dreamed big.

Fame and fortune had been put on the docket, and only power needed a slot. Lucky for me, I had also decided I wanted to be the mayor of Atlanta by the age of thirty-five. Of the dreams I had for myself, becoming mayor struck me as the most ambitious. I'd read a handful of prominent black suspense writers, and Oprah had already begun her path to great wealth, so the road to items 1 and 2 seemed doable, albeit incredibly challenging. Although Atlanta had a black mayor, no black woman had led a major city in the nation, so I allocated fifteen years of prep time. All this while sitting in Spelman's computer lab late into the night.

Though my list was exhaustive, and driven by grief and the need to reclaim my sense of self, the results were vitally important. I began to access what I wanted. I might not get there in all those arenas (though I have come close!), and my specific ambitions might not endure, but that wasn't the point. The point was that I was letting myself experience the feeling of wanting itself: acknowledging in print-in a formal spreadsheet even-that I could see myself thriving in the world, that I was allowed to dare to want.

This audacity of ambition starkly contrasted with the place where I'd grown up. As a high school senior, I had a solid GPA and a list of notable achievements, but I wasn't terribly outgoing and never had been. In childhood games with my sisters, I'd pretended to be a tycoon, a superhero, or President of the World, but those dreams held as much reality as an episode of Dynasty. In my real life, my natural introversion meant that I had few close friends and I rarely socialized outside of school.

Reading served as the spark for my imagination of a different future. I rarely met a professional person in daily life, though there was the occasional doctor or professor at the college where my mother served as librarian. And I certainly didn't see them in my neighborhood where most people worked hourly-wage jobs. Because I didn't know people who had grand dreams, moving beyond make-believe seemed harder and harder as I grew older and games lost their allure.

After hours in front of the computer that night, I reread my spreadsheet and surprised myself by laughing out loud. Suddenly I saw the obnoxiousness of the list of to-dos that I'd painstakingly plotted. Part of me laughed at the sheer length of the list and the incredible heights I wanted to reach in so many arenas. But I also laughed with self-mockery. Despite being surrounded by Spelman's daughters of accomplishment, I had no clear way to do any of what I'd imagined.

My finger lingered over the Delete key, but in the end, I pressed Save. While my boyfriend's derision compelled me out of my room, the project was mine alone. In the lab that night, I realized a core tenet behind deciding what you want: don't stop yourself with the logic of possibility.

Logic is a seductive excuse for setting low expectations. Its cool, rational precision urges you to believe that it makes sense to limit yourself. And when your goal means you'll be the first, or one of the few, as I desired, logic tells you that if it were possible, someone else would have done it by now.

Whether the hesitation comes from well-meaning counselors or skeptical bosses or from that little voice in your head, embracing ambition means learning not to listen too closely to anyone. Ambition should be heady stuff. It should make your neck itch and your palms sweat. Or, if you're lucky, ambition may bring a smile to your face. The smile of actually seeing a different, bigger future.

I Don't Want What I Haven't Got (and Other Lies)

Over the next several years, I curated my spreadsheet like Gollum tending his Precious, but I also continued to question the rightness of my reach. While I would proudly tell certain friends of my dreams, the sheer boldness of my ambitions gnawed at me. And even carefully organized spreadsheets can't predict the future, I would find out. But they-or another form of planning-are more than an avoidance technique. Knowing what lights you up and embracing what you daydream about are the first steps.

What comes next to turn ambition into action is understanding the why. When you understand the roots of your dreams, you will have deeper insight into why you want what you want. You'll be able to either strengthen your resolve or clarify if the target you've chosen is the right one. What you want to do and why you want to do it should align.

I can easily trace my goal of becoming mayor to my freshman year of college. Through my volunteer work, I'd already regularly attended city council meetings and understood the importance of a mayor's decisions in tackling the poverty in Atlanta. When I first added the goal to my spreadsheet, I held a superficial dream of being in charge of the city. But later in that spring of 1992, America exploded when the Rodney King verdict was announced in late April. In Los Angeles, the city teemed with a violence that had not been seen in decades. In downtown Atlanta, where I attended school, young black men and women smashed windows, overturned cars, and ransacked the city. For my part, I joined with fellow students in a silent march down to city hall from the Atlanta University Center, known to Atlantans as the AUC.

The AUC-the nation's largest contiguous consortium of historically black colleges and universities-included Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morris Brown College, and Spelman College, as well as the Interdenominational Theological Center and the Morehouse School of Medicine. The AUC possesses a proud tradition of civic engagement, as the college home of luminaries such as Martin Luther King Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, and Walter Francis White. I wanted to do their legacy justice, and I felt called to continue their work.

Yet, although I helped lead the peaceful protest, the gesture felt emptier than I expected. I understood what drove those angry young people to hurl bottles and shout epithets. Some of the protesters lived in the oldest housing projects in Georgia, stolid rust-brown buildings situated across the street. For those who lived a stone's throw beyond the privileged gates of Spelman and Morehouse, of Clark Atlanta and Morris Brown, their violence expressed an impotence and outrage too explosive for dignified marches.

I revered the civil rights movement and appreciated the laws that granted us the right to ride buses, to sit at lunch counters, to cast ballots. But the slowness of real change fueled the riots' intensity, from coast to coast. Decades later, inequality still ravaged poor and black communities. Then toss in the continued international struggle to end apartheid, the skyrocketing incarceration rates that scooped up too many of black folks' cousins, and a youth poverty rate that defied the wealth of the era. I knew the truth behind their rage.

In the wake of the Rodney King verdict, college kid and disenfranchised neighbor alike, we reviled the decision of twelve jurors to ignore the videotaped evidence of racist cops. Yet the riots posed only a distant distraction for a number of my fellow college students. On our campuses, final exams were beginning and students unmoved by or inattentive to the social unrest hurried around the AUC to take their last tests. They had little interest in the Korean grocery stores being looted as frustrations boiled between neighbors or in the black businesses destroyed in a blaze of Molotov cocktails. Amid the destruction, most of the talented tenths of the AUC ignored calls for marches in favor of turning in term papers. As college students, we'd been trained to believe that our education separated us from those outside our classrooms, and we would do our best work for everyone by acing our tests, not by direct action.

Still, as the police moved into our area of the city to quell the unrest, a strange thing happened. Tear gas canisters rained down onto our college quads, vile smoke flooding the open spaces. Across the street, similar bombs exploded in the eyes of Section 8 housing dwellers. The police swarmed onto our campuses and the housing projects both, and suddenly, any distinctions between our two worlds were meaningless. The police only saw congregations of young blacks, and race became a unifying marker of guilt.

The Atlanta police cordoned off the interstate exit leading to the area, and marked cars stationed around the area prevented anyone from leaving. Trapped on campus, I fumbled for a way to act, unaware that the next few hours would change the course of my life. Watching the news, I heard false reports about why the area was under siege and facile explanations for complex social problems. After seething and talking back to the television set, I called the most offensive station to demand they do a better job of telling the story. The person who answered my call refused to take my message to her superiors. She politely hung up on me, and I less politely called back. Just before her third hang-up, she snapped that I was tying up the line.

Truth telling, especially stories about minorities, matters. We are so frequently viewed through lenses that encourage the majority to fear us or to distrust us. That afternoon, I watched as an entire city-a nation in microcosm-heard from their news reporters to once again be afraid of black people. To believe us all to be destructive, angry vandals rather than complex human beings who had seen in a single verdict an indictment of our humanity. If Rodney King could be beaten on tape, and his known police assailants exonerated, what would stop others from furthering our treatment as subhuman?

Quickly, I looked up the numbers to all the television stations. Before the advent of 24/7 cable news, most people got their sense of what was happening from just four networks. Worried that their stories would cement a narrative about blacks in Atlanta, I scribbled down the numbers on several sheets of paper. I went up and down the halls of my dorm and organized fellow students to begin calling the television stations to extend our protests. Like the march, the act of making calls didn't require extraordinary courage, but dialing phones gave my friends and me a way to help. As I'd learned from my parents, protest takes on multiple forms. And, as I'd also learned, being black did not change with zip code or by entering the elite gates of a private college. But a phone call to a newsroom could change the conversation, if only for thirty seconds. Soon, the television stations demanded a name to go along with the phone calls jamming their lines. I flippantly told my friends to just give the news stations my name.

Again, this was not a premeditated or complicated strategic act, which we often associate with ambition. The why of ambition can be born in a moment. The decision to act, to reach, can be in response to an external crisis. Or, a fleeting idea can ignite you and point you toward something bigger than you are. The key is to be aware of what is going on both around you and inside you, staying open to opportunities to authentically express what you believe and who you are.

As our phone strategy stretched on, I watched the footage of our campuses surrounded by cop cars. Rage dueled with sadness as I saw the treatment of black students and residents in a city ostensibly run by and for black folks. In the end, we were all the same to those in charge.

My reaction to the equity of suspicion shamed me. If I was honest with myself, I was upset because all my borrowed trappings of elitism meant nothing as Atlanta burned. That disquiet stayed with me the rest of the day, scratching at my conscience. I had to confront the why of my outrage and how I would deal with its aftermath. I needed to probe my own sense of privilege. But, for the moment, I needed to focus on correcting the record.

Unfortunately, our phone jams of the TV stations had no effect on their coverage. However, by the early evening, a television producer invited me to join a community town hall to be simulcast across the city. I assume they picked me because of my prolific phone calls (and I was the only real name they had).

I arrived at the studio where I met Mayor Maynard Jackson for the first time. I had seen him before from afar, but I had not met the legendary man who, at the age of thirty-five, had become the first African American mayor of Atlanta and of any major city in the South. Race had driven him-both the reality that blacks could control a major city and the history of how the city had treated blacks. Nearly twenty years later, a different issue of race stirred me now. Black people occupied the mayor's office and much of the city council and held high positions in commerce and civic life. Despite the visible progress Mayor Jackson's legacy had yielded, race continued to define many of our problems. Poverty, struggling schools, and decaying communities plagued black faces in a city that had black leadership.

Awed to be in the presence of such a powerful leader, a black one no less, I listened as he offered his analysis of the riots. While he acknowledged the profound disappointment of the verdict, he decried the reaction. Then he offered choice words for the young demonstrators who had wreaked havoc on his city. As he spoke, my awe turned to anger. This powerful man who stood at the head of a city known for its civil disobedience seemed to hold no sympathy for those who found no other outlet for their despair. So he had sent the police to public housing and to our campuses.

Anger, like any strong emotion, can move us beyond our normal comfort zones. In front of cameras and the crowd, I demanded to know what the mayor had done for the dispossessed youth of Atlanta. For the undereducated who turned to gangs and drugs. For the impoverished who worried more about their next meal than their grades.

With a boldness that surprised me, I excoriated his record and scoffed at his leadership. If I'd thought more deeply before I stood, I might have held my tongue. But I had shed much of my fear of not being right during that Telluride summer program. And since I was there, in the halls of power, being relentless seemed in order. In this moment I had access to power, a voice, and a question. Sometimes the why of ambition can only be discovered in a nervy action that cuts against our natural instincts. Maybe it is asking the question in a meeting that no one else has-and that you think may expose your ignorance. Or pushing back on a superior. Presenting an idea others have mocked. Speaking up does not create ambition, but the act can help you to clear away what might be blocking your view.

In return, Mayor Jackson lectured me on how far the city had come, about the sacrifices made by earlier generations. Then he looked down at me from his very imposing height and promised to give my concerns due consideration.

And the mayor kept his promise. A few months later, I began work as the research assistant at the Mayor's Office of Youth Services for the City of Atlanta during my sophomore year in college. Like a lot of college students, I worked while going to school. In my case, the job changed my life, channeling my worries about injustice into a place designed to guarantee access. I had not been naïve about government's power, but on the inside, I saw firsthand how government, though an imperfect tool, provided a way for an introvert like me to raise my voice and act.

Those two days in late April imprinted themselves on me, sharpening a childhood that had prepared me to wonder about how I would help my people. I didn't come from a political family, had never had a full conversation with a politician, even when I had attended zoning hearings at city hall. And though I had typed in my goal of becoming mayor weeks before, those days revealed why the role could be so vital. What I had were opportunities that those outside Spelman's gates did not, and I had a responsibility to do more because I'd made it inside.

For the next decade, I followed the plans on my spreadsheet. I failed miserably at becoming a millionaire by thirty, but I met enough of my metrics to be in a pretty good position. According to my calculations and the plaudits of those who knew my goals, I was on track to achieve my life's ambition: becoming mayor of Atlanta.

Turns out, I was wrong.

I don't want to be the mayor-of anywhere. I focused on a job title and work that seemed to meet my dreams, but the job itself should never have been the dream. Ambition should be more than a title or a position. I'd focused on the what, not the why, and for more than a decade, I organized my life around that what. I understand now that knowing the real reason for your ambition allows you to figure out if a different path will get you there.

This is a distinction of immense difference. At its most complex, ambition should be an animation of soul. Not simply a job, but a disquiet that requires you to take action. For me, my ambition owed as much to my desire to serve communities isolated by poverty and racism as it did to my refusal to believe either had to be permanent fixtures in our lives. I latched on to the role of mayor as the clearest path to what I imagined could be accomplished. But realizing the why of my ambition allowed me to alter course and explore new roles that could accomplish the outcomes even more effectively.

We all set our sights on jobs we want, titles we covet. But, like dating the wrong person, we have to learn to understand what is truly for us and be willing to break up to find the real thing. We stay too long in jobs, hoping the work changes, rather than hunting for the right fit. Ambition means being proactive. The executive who becomes a writer. The teacher who becomes a banker. The shipyard worker who becomes a minister. Those are our inspirations. Being willing and able to change course means honing our ambition to the point where we know when it's time to move on or up.

Becoming mayor isn't the only ambition I had wrong. Rather than writing the seminal espionage novel, I became a romantic suspense writer. Turns out, once I put pen to paper, I finally understood I wanted to write stories about women who looked like me, ones whose lives were as exciting as anything I'd read or seen on a movie screen. I didn't have to be Ian Fleming to tell those tales. When I let go of my fixation on crafting the pièce de résistance of spy craft fiction, I found a story-and a career-that I had never imagined.

I first ran for office because I understood that government has a tremendous capacity to help people unlock their own potential, and I wanted a job where I could foster change for families like mine. Families who want more than entry-level jobs that pay the lowest wages. I want to lead a state that does more than survive-doing okay by some, and not so great by too many of us. That means becoming governor, although no black woman has ever held the job in American history.

I have absolute clarity on the role I want next, but as you consider what wakes you up, don't discount the importance of having no real answer to the question. Indecision, effectively applied, is a great way to figure it out. Give yourself the space to explore why you don't know what you want. Is it that you are afraid of the scope of your dreams? Or that you have too many dreams to pick just one? Maybe you haven't seen enough of the world to know what you want. Perhaps the hesitation lies somewhere in between. Finding your ambition demands that you allow yourself the time and energy to understand what holds you back from defining what you really want.

I am a living example of the fact that there is no glory in having only one supreme goal. Too few books on achieving your dreams acknowledge that we are multifaceted beings with many different talents and interests. Society sometimes chides us to be focused on one goal, one passion, one ambition. It starts in college when we're told to pick a major. Or think about the suspicion we feel when an actor announces a Christmas album or a politician writes a romance novel. "Jack of all trades, master of none" is the unkindest cut.

Benjamin Banneker, astronomer, clockmaker, and abolitionist, who laid out the plans for Washington, DC, also carried on a heated correspondence with Thomas Jefferson over the abolition of slavery. Professor of mathematics Dalip Singh Saund broke barriers as an Indian American who fought to secure the right for Indian immigrants to become US citizens in 1949. Forced to be a farmer for much of his time in the United States, he later became a US congressman, the first Indian to serve. Think of Beyoncé and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who master multiple arts, securing Grammys, Oscar nominations, and Tonys for their works. But also, consider the dedicated nurse who spends every weekend at the animal shelter, driven by an ambition to treat the suffering.

It's been twenty years and my spreadsheet, now upgraded to Excel, has been edited several times. Swap in or out a dozen jobs, many I never imagined at eighteen, and I better understand why the spreadsheet is so important to me.

While I climbed my way toward what I thought was the mayor's office, I also honed my skills as an attorney. I learned the law under the tutelage of exceptional lawyers, including Teresa Wynn Roseborough, a brilliant woman who had become the first black woman partner at our law firm.

One afternoon I sat in her spacious office, the sunlight from the twenty-first-floor windows streaming in and lighting the room with a pearlescent glow. My digs on the twenty-third floor of the law firm were not too shabby, especially for a third-year associate. I had a window, a secretary, and a path to partnership. My job at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan came as close to marrying my interests as any legal role could. As a tax attorney, I had burrowed my way into a tiny subgroup that specialized in tax-exempt organization law. Shorthand: I helped nonprofits and charities but got paid like a corporate attorney. Our clients ranged from multinational NGOs to well-financed corporations that did business with nonprofits to universities and hospitals.

Yet I had grown restless and thought more and more about my spreadsheet and the political goals I recorded there. I sat in Teresa's office and shared my plan for how I would move from my perch on the twenty-third floor to city hall. Instead of the approving nod to my careful planning, she challenged my focus on the mayor's job. Was it a broad enough platform for the visions I held? Did I only want to affect Atlanta, or should my ambition aim even higher?

When you decide what you want and why you want it, take action immediately. Do not wait for an invitation to act. I promise you, the letter is not in the mail. Know what you want. Know why you want it. Know how you will achieve it. Then get started. Take a class, apply for a job, read a book about it. But do something that moves you forward at a constant pace. If you can walk away for days, weeks, or years at a time, it is not an ambition-it's a wish. Wishes feel good and rarely come true. Ambition, on the other hand, fuels your days and refuses to be ignored. It challenges your sense of self and fulfills your sense of wonder. So pay attention.

And get to work.
Ambition Exercise
We tend to measure our passions by their likelihood of success, not the joy and excitement they bring. Use this exercise to reveal if you are being honest about what your ambitions truly are.

You can find this and all the exercises in this book online at minorityleaderbook.com/exercises.pdf. I encourage you to download the sheets and fill them out. It will make a world of difference.

What would you do if you had unlimited money?

If you could do any five things for the rest of your life, what would they be?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

What else would you ask for?

Rank your top five activities from most appealing to least appealing.

Would you swap out anything from the "what else" list for what you wrote as your top five activities? Why or why not?

Copyright © 2018 by Stacey Abrams

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Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change by Stacey Abrams

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Excerpt Dare to Want More I sit in the living room, a cozy space, warm in the early summer. I am perched on the edge of the sofa next to Valerie, the home's owner, a lovely black woman in her late forties.

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"Purpose is not what we do but why we exist."

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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51791252-the-vanishing-half

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A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.

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A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical.

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Robert Jones, Jr's debut novel. Available January 5, 2021.

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https://barbarasbookstores.com/review-black-buck/

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A month ago, I'd never heard of Mateo Askaripour. Today I would buy anything from him.

This young debut author apparently polished his patter as director of sales at a tech start-up. Now he's bounced off that success to produce an irresistible comic novel about the tenacity of racism in corporate America. " Black Buck," which marks the launch of an effervescent new career, is alternately sly and sweet, a work of cultural criticism that laments and celebrates the power of money.

In a tradition stretching back to Ben Franklin, Askaripour positions this Bildungsroman as a self-help manual, but the book is cast with a distinct hue. Darren, the narrator, tells us: "I am a black man on a mission. No, I am a black salesman on a mission." Writing from his penthouse overlooking Central Park, Darren wants only to give other Black people the tools they need to fulfill their dreams. The introduction is as American as Dale Carnegie, and the story that follows is periodically interrupted by habits of highly effective people who would make Stephen Covey proud:

Reader: Watch closely and take notes. Sales isn't about talent, it's about overcoming obstacles, beginning with yourself.

Depending on the light, the magical sheen of Askaripour's prose can make those bits of homespun advice look wholly sincere or wickedly parodic. "Every day is deals day" for Darren, an ambitious Black man always working in two registers - playing along and the long game.

But when the story begins, Darren is a very different person than the Black Tony Robbins who introduces this story. He's just a happy 22-year-old dude living with his mom in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Despite graduating as valedictorian of his class at Bronx School of Science, he never went to college and has been working the last four years at a Park Avenue Starbucks. "Now I'm not trying to brag," he tells us, "but I was what you'd call a Starbucks prodigy."

Alas, that tall distinction doesn't hold much water with his mom or his girlfriend, who gently prod Darren to think bigger. Perhaps their advice is what motivates him on one otherwise ordinary day to confront a high-powered businessman who always orders a Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew.

"I don't think you want that today," Darren says.

That's one small step for barista, one giant leap for conquista. His journey toward worldwide commercial fame has begun! The businessman is so impressed by Darren's coffee salesmanship that he hires him away from Starbucks for the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to be a sales associate at Sumwun, the hot new therapy service that's taking over the Internet.

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Askaripour has a sharp eye for the comic absurdity of online start-ups. Sumwun employees - "Sumwunners"! - zip around their supercool office on scooters, dodging colleagues' dogs and bopping to blaring music. "The burning passion, the unrestrained madness, the electricity. Can you feel it?" Darren's boss asks. It's a gleaming empire of fascist enthusiasm and panicked optimism goosed by the gleeful chanting of New Age aphorisms and impossible sales goals. "Always. Be. Closing!" the CEO shouts like some Silicon Valley version of Alec Baldwin.

But what makes "Black Buck" rise above other corporate satires is Askaripour's dexterous treatment of race in the modern workplace. As the only Black man in the office, Darren finds himself among colleagues determined to prove how post-racial they are. In a gag that runs through the novel, they're constantly asking him, "Has anyone ever told you that you look like Malcolm X?" "Has anyone ever told you that you look like Martin Luther King?" "Has anyone ever told you that you look like Sidney Poitier?"

His manager is the worst. "I knew you looked familiar," he says, "but I wasn't sure if it was in the way most black people look alike. Not in a racist way, of course."

That "of course" - that presumption of White innocence - is invoked to excuse an ever-expanding host of racist humiliations that begin with changing his name to "Buck."

"You don't mind, do you, Buck?"

Well, does he? How about being doused with white paint? Is that okay?

On the other hand, Darren's salary instantly jumps from $19,000 to $65,000. Surely, that's enough to justify doing a little spontaneous rapping when the boss requests it. Right?

Reader: If you are a black man, the key to any white person's heart is the ability to shuck, jive, or freestyle. But use it wisely and sparingly. Otherwise you're liable to turn into Steve Harvey.

Askaripour sweeps us along with Buck's dazzling career, but it's impossible to ignore the job's horrible cost. Yes, he may have lost touch with his family and old friends, but look how effective he is on TV! As a Black man willing to talk about "diversity" while politely avoiding the word "race," he's a corporate darling. And the national media, acting out its nuance-free obsession with saviors and villains, plays right along. "A large part of me knew that none of this was right," Darren tells us, "but I wasn't doing this for myself, I was doing it for . . . everyone else who believed in me. I just had to man up and take it."

[The 10 most-read book reviews of 2020]

This is satire richly fertilized with Trumpist anxiety. Darren - Buck - confronts fragility so finely attuned that even to suggest the existence of racism incites a White backlash of racist attacks cloaked in sententious outrage. It's a brilliant sendup of the way some privileged people respond to the gentlest, most practical efforts to combat discrimination.

But don't imagine you've got Askaripour all figured out. The syncopated tone of "Black Buck" keeps the story constantly shifting. In these pages, even cringe-inducing moments can suddenly slip into wise counsel or heartfelt confession. No matter how lacerating this vision of systemic racism is, Darren seems buoyed by a generous spirit, a well of joy that feels downright miraculous.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.

Black Buck

By Mateo Askaripour

HMH. 381 pp. $26

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Mateo Askaripour's 'Black Buck' is an irresistible comic novel about the tenacity of racism in corporate America

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A month ago, I'd never heard of Mateo Askaripour. Today I would buy anything from him. This young debut author apparently polished his patter as director of sales at a tech start-up. Now he's bounced off that success to produce an irresistible comic novel about the tenacity of racism in corporate America.

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Yaa Gyasi

As a child Gifty would ask her parents to tell the story of their journey from Ghana to Alabama, seeking escape in myths of heroism and romance. When her father and brother succumb to the hard reality of immigrant life in the American South, their family of four becomes two - and the life Gifty dreamed of slips away. Years later, desperate to understand the opioid addiction that destroyed her brother's life, she turns to science for answers. But when her mother comes to stay, Gifty soon learns that the roots of their tangled traumas reach farther than she ever thought. Tracing her family's story through continents and generations will take her deep into the dark heart of modern America.

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Transcendent Kingdom - Women's Prize for Fiction

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Yaa Gyasi As a child Gifty would ask her parents to tell the story of their journey from Ghana to Alabama, seeking escape in myths of heroism and romance. When her father and brother succumb to the hard reality of immigrant life in the American South, their family of four becomes two - and the life Gifty dreamed of slips away.

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Perfect for high school and college graduation gifts. On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder.

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Assata An Autobiography - Assata Shakur Book - Personal And Political Autobiography - Classic Reading - Gift Book

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Perfect for high school and college graduation gifts. On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had

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A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making-from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy
In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency-a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.

Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation's highest office.

Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune's Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden.

A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective-the story of one man's bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of "hope and change," and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible.

This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama's conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.

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Crown is proud to partner with these international publishers for the worldwide publication of A Promised Land. An English-language edition will be published in the UK and British Commonwealth territories by Viking, an imprint of Penguin General Books at Penguin Random House UK. It will also be available in the following languages:

German Penguin Verlag/Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe Portuguese Brazil Companhia das Letras Portuguese Portugal Objectiva/Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial Spanish Debate/Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial French Editions Fayard Albanian Dudaj Publishing Arabic Hachette Antoine/Naufal Bulgarian SoftPress Complex Chinese Business Weekly Group Czech Argo Danish Lindhardt og Ringhof Dutch Hollands Diep Finnish Otava Publishing Company Greek Athens Bookstore Publications Hebrew Yedioth Books Hungarian HVG Publishing Co. Italian Garzanti Japanese Shueisha Korean Woongjin Think Big Co., Ltd. Lithuanian Alma Littera Norwegian Cappelen Damm Polish Agora Publishing House Romanian Editura Litera Swedish Albert Bonniers förlag Vietnamese First News - Tri Viet Publishing Co., Ltd.

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A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making-from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency-a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.

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In Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon," the character Pilate Dead is missing a navel, making her an object of both suspicion and awe.

She was, as she says in the book, "cut off from people early," left without a trace of her physical connection to her mother. Pilate becomes a drifter, untethered to any one place, but her independence isn't the same as freedom. As Nadia Owusu writes in "Aftershocks" - a gorgeous and unsettling memoir of Owusu's own peripatetic childhood, along with the bewilderment and breakdown that came after - it's only when Pilate learns about her family's ancestral home in Virginia that she becomes free.

"The idea of roots setting a person free is counterintuitive, but deracination from the past, from land, from family, from mothers, makes for an unstable present," Owusu writes. Her book is an attempt to understand what it means to be rooted and rootless, to have not one mother but two: a birth mother who left the family when Owusu was barely a toddler, and a stepmother who could be possessive and cruel.

Owusu's birth mother was Armenian-American; her father was Ghanaian; her stepmother was from a small village near Mount Kilimanjaro. Owusu herself was born in Tanzania. Her father worked for a United Nations agency, and Owusu lived all over - Tanzania, England, Italy, Ethiopia, Uganda. She moved to New York at 18, and studied urban planning: "I was fascinated by place because no place had ever belonged to me."

"Aftershocks" is thematically structured like an earthquake, including the rumbling foreshocks and the shuddering ground after an upheaval. The narrative swings back and forth in time, from Owusu's earliest memories to a week she spent in her room a decade ago, when she was 28, barely moving from a blue rocking chair she had pulled off the street and hauled up to her Manhattan apartment. "I have written for meaning rather than order," she says in a prefatory note. She keeps returning to her chosen metaphor, looking for the fault lines, closing in on the epicenter. "The softer the soil, the stronger the shaking," she writes.
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of January. See the full list. ]
Her seven days in the blue chair were occasioned by her stepmother telling her that her father hadn't died of brain cancer, as Owusu had believed, but of AIDS. Owusu had idolized her father; she calls him her "Baba-Mama," the parent who believed in her, who loved her. He died just before she turned 14; she remembers him slipping in and out of delirium, crying out for his own mother in his sleep. They were living in Rome at the time, because her father happened to be stationed there. But Ghana, which she visited, didn't feel like home to her either. The ancestral mourning rituals that his family forced her to endure made her feel even more alienated.

It wasn't supposed to be that way. Owusu was raised to feel as if she could live anywhere. "I know how my parents believed their love and the birth of their daughters to be a part of something important," she writes, "a movement fueled by borderless love." Her father's family lamented his decision to marry a white woman. "Any river loses its identity when entering the sea," they said. The marriage failed; Owusu had to struggle to piece together who she was, where she belonged, whom she loved. Was her father's family right?

They were and they weren't. "Aftershocks" knits together the author's own experiences with the histories of some of the places she has lived. She has seen poverty and suffering and civil wars, but always at a remove, while ensconced in the privileged bubble of expat life. She was in high school in Kampala, Uganda, when there was a string of grenade attacks in the city, but she doesn't remember feeling worried. "What was the worst we could imagine while watching 'Melrose Place?'" she writes. Her view of herself is exacting and remorseless. "I did not fear for my life because I knew my life would be protected over the lives of others."

Her identity, though, felt malleable and tenuous. Its shifting terrain meant she could empathize with different experiences and hold multiple truths at once, rejecting the concepts of essentialism and supremacy. But it also left her feeling unmoored. At 12, while attending a boarding school in England, her desire to belong was so overwhelming that she allied herself with the white girls who tormented the only other Black girl at the school.

Elsewhere in the book she writes of the kind of split loyalties that were fostered and exacerbated under colonial rule - another fault line. The more Owusu looks, the more fissures she finds. Even the independence movements had their cracks, where incommensurate motives rubbed up against each other. She recounts the tangled legacy of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first prime minister and her baby brother's namesake: "He was freedom fighter and dictator; father of the nation and pillager in chief."

Owusu begins to reconsider the stories she told herself - how she viewed her stepmother, Anabel, as a one-dimensional figure for decades, because her story "required a villain." How she idealized her father to the point where her brittle notion of him couldn't withstand the shock of what her stepmother told her about his death. "As a god, my father couldn't have hurt my mother or Anabel, couldn't have had affairs, couldn't have died of AIDS," she writes. "I have work to do on myself. I need a new story."

Sitting in her blue chair in Manhattan, Owusu decided to put on a Coltrane album. Her father had loved Coltrane and tried to get her to listen to his late work, but "the skirmishing horns and keys" unnerved her. Decades later, hearing the music's sublime cacophony, she felt something she hadn't felt before: free.

"My father knew the time would come when my questions would threaten to overwhelm me, when the answers available to me would be unbearably insufficient, when harmony would be out of reach," she writes. "I should have listened sooner."

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In 'Aftershocks,' a Search for Home in a Life Around the World

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In Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon," the character Pilate Dead is missing a navel, making her an object of both suspicion and awe. She was, as she says in the book, "cut off from people early," left without a trace of her physical connection to her mother.

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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/227986.There_Is_Confusion?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=opy8YPse2X&rank=1

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From Good Reads.com
In her last novel, Dorothy West, an iconic member of the Harlem Renaissance, offers an intimate glimpse into African American middle class.  Set on bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s, The Wedding tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie.  Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society," we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from "a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions." Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.

With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.