Hood Rat, K’wan, St. Martin’s Griffin, ISBN # 0-312-36008-8, $14.95.
K’wan defines a hood rat as “a woman of questionable repute, one who has been known to ‘get around’ in the ‘hood,’ and Hood Rat features four of Harlem’s most scandalous women. Yoshi is young, sexy, and larcenous; Billy is a former high school athlete at the end of her rope with the male race; Reese is an around-the-way chick, pregnant from one of her one night stands; and Rhonda is a 20-something with three kids, by three different men, and riding the system all the way to the bank. K’wan is one of the most prominent and bestselling authors in the street-lit genre.
I Found Out: Faith Is Forged By Fire, Linda C. Shaw, PublishAmerica, ISBN # 1-4241-5133-3, $19.95.
I Found Out: Faith Is Forged By Fire, written by Aurora, Colorado resident Linda C. Shaw, is an intimate journey that uncovers hidden things so that the light of God’s salvation is made known. Shaw’s story unwinds in poetic verse and illuminates the power of God by demonstration of His promises through His word. Though it might seem the enemy is winning, God gets the glory out of every situation. Why? Because God can use anyone for anything, but he is glorified through a vessel that has been purged by fire and has come out as pure gold.
Immortality Of Influence, Salome Thomas-EL, Kensington, ISBN # 0-7582-1266-6, $23.
Salome Thomas-EL, winner of Philadelphia Magazine's 2006 Best Philadelphian Award, has helped hundreds of troubled children get into major high schools and universities. Yet, he still finds himself devastated by the long-ago death of a promising young student named Willow Briggs. Willow's death launched Salome Thomas-EL on his mission to be a positive influence, and to encourage everyone to set the best example possible for young people. Thomas-EL is also author of the best-seller I Choose To Stay.
Let’s Get It On: 15 Hot Tips And Tricks To Spice Up Your Sex Life, LaDawn Black, Ballantine Books One World, ISBN # 0-345-48664-6, $12.95.
Take your “sex game” to the next level with these sensual but practical tips from radio host and relationship diva LaDawn Black. Covering the romantic to the racy, long-time lovers to hot hookups, this how-to erotic manual is for anyone with the urge to change up his or her libido and make sex every bit as fun and fulfilling as it should be. Filled with candid anecdotes, Q and A’s from her number one radio show, and sexual arsenal builders, no topic is off-limits and no story is too intimate to share. Let’s Get It On is the only book that will give you the confidence and the skill to take your sex life to the sizzling heights you may have only dreamed about.
Little Ghetto Girl, Danielle Santiago, Atria, ISBN # 0-7432-9747-4, $14.
Little Ghetto Girl is the first book in Santiago’s successful self-published A Harlem Story trilogy. It begins in 2000, when dazzling and smart Kisa “Kane” Santiago, queen of her own cocaine ring in New York at 21, decides it’s time to get out of the game. With a legitimate, lucrative hair salon and day spa, she’s ready to settle down, go straight, get an education, and start a family. The streets aren’t prepared to surrender their royalty that easy, though, because Kane falls in love with the king of the game. He is sincere, the boss of the family, the charismatic head of a drug operation worth well over $20 million a year, and he has a soft spot only for her.
Out of the Ashes, James Langston, Lulu Enterprises, ISBN # 978-1-4116-9658-7, $10.
As he watched his mother wipe away the sweat and push through the struggles and failures of raising eight children alone, little did James Langston realize that a strong determination was also being built in him: a determination that would keep him going no matter how impossible the odds. And those long afternoons in the cotton fields as a child taught him something: "If you want it bad enough, then you won't mind the aching back, sweaty brow or sleepless nights to get it." Although Out of the Ashes was written on a shoestring budget of $100, its message is as apropos to the executive as it is to the one left ravaged by the cruelties of life. The books subtitle, ". . . sometimes the only thing a poor man has left is his story," is a testament to the faith and perseverance of millions who refused to lie down and let life walk all over them.
A Respectable Trade, Philippa Gregory, Touchstone, ISBN # 0-7432-7254-4, $16.
Frances Scott’s marriage to Josiah Cole is a mutually convenient solution. Josiah, a small dockside trader in Bristol, uses Frances’ social connections and capital to join the big players of the city. Trading her connections for Josiah’s protection, Frances finds her life and her fortune dependent on the respectable trade of sugar, rum, and slaves. Into her new world comes Mehuru, once a priest in the ancient African kingdom of Yoruba, now a slave in England. From opposite ends of the earth, despite the difference in status, Mehuru and Frances confront each other and their need for love and liberty.
Ten Successful Startups: How Their Setbacks, Management Strategies and Practical Lessons Can Help You Succeed In Business, Harry Wells, iUniverse, ISBN # 0-595-85781-7, $16.95.
As a business advisor in the heart of Manhattan in New York City, Harry Wells has counseled hundreds of entrepreneurs and assisted them in obtaining millions of dollars for business startup and expansion. His book, Ten Successful Start-Ups, takes a behind-the-scenes look into how common working people built their start-up businesses into multimillion-dollar companies. What makes this book a compelling read and so relevant to today's entrepreneur is that many of the business owners featured in the book discuss crisis management in the new millennium and the concrete steps they used to survive such tragedies as the World Trade Center disaster, offshore competition, the heavy hand of the Internal Revenue Service and other chilling challenges. The reader is taken inside the mindset of an entrepreneur, their struggle for survival and unquenchable thirst for growth and new opportunities.
View Park, Angela Winters, K Trade, ISBN # 0-7582-1259-3, $14.
In this captivating new family saga, Angela Winters invites you into the scandalous, glamorous, intriguing world of one of the country's wealthiest and most powerful African-American families. Steven Chase is the head of one of the wealthiest African-American families in the country and the most scandalous. In Los Angeles, he has built a cosmetics empire from nothing. With a perfect society wife at his side, he continues to conquer and push Chase Beauty higher while his sons and daughters fight outside forces, and each other, to hold on to their wealth and position and acquire everything they desire! But a family at the top has the farthest to fall.
When Angels Speak Of Love, Bell Hooks, Atria, ISBN # 0-7434-5609-2, $16.95.
Social activist, iconic feminist and beloved teacher Bell Hooks is the renowned author of over 20 books. Now she animates and scripts the experience of love and loss in her debut collection of poems, When Angels Speak Of Love. Weaving together brief feisty lines that address longing, rage, infatuation, euphoria, rescue and surrender, Hooks inspires the reader to brazen out all that love has to offer. This compellation offers 50 bold and seductive poems, each rediscovering a particular stage of passion, joy or anguish in inspired verse and engaging both the spirit and the mind in Hook’s signature style.
White Lines, Tracy Brown, St. Martin’s Griffin, ISBN # 0-312-33648-9, $14.95.
Jada leaves home at the age of 16, running from her own demons and the horrors of physical abuse inflicted on her by her mother’s boyfriend. She parties hard, and life seems good when she is with Born, the neighborhood kingpin whose name is synonymous with money, power, and respect. But all his love can’t save her from a crack addition. Jada goes from crack addict and prostitute to survivor and back again before she finds the strength to live for herself and come out on top. And her stormy romance with one of the fiercest hustlers on the streets makes White Lies one of the most unforgettable urban love stories of the year.
Book Reviews by Kam Williams
Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation, Natalie Hopkinson & Natalie Y. Moore, Cleis Press, ISBN # 1-57344-257-7, $14.95.
“Hip-hop, whose entire aesthetic, at least as promulgated on cable and
Radio, seems to be based on the world’s oldest profession; all men are pimps and all the women are hos. As a whole, the Hip-Hop Generation has found prostitution to be an apt metaphor for American capitalism, which… has taken the literal and figurative pimping of black culture to new depth”
--Excerpted from Chapter 6, The Pole Test
It’s too bad that a book as good as this one would have as misleading a
title and cover photo as Deconstructing Tyrone. The authors, Natalie Hopkinson and Natalie Y. Moore, obviously had a sense that there was a problem, because they devoted most of their introduction to explaining the meaning of “deconstruction” and the derivation of the word Tyrone (Greek for “king”) before explaining that Tyrone isn’t a individual, or even one type of Black man, but “an abstract idea” which “tends to evoke a range of emotions.”
But both Natalies more than make up for that distracting digression by following it up with a superb, thorough and intellectually honest examination of the present-day African American male. Leaving no stone unturned, the two assess how such phenomena as homophobia, the incarceration rate, brothers on the down-low, abandonment by baby-daddies, gangsta’ rap’s influence, academic underachievement and underemployment have contributed to what they see as an unfortunate schism between brothers and sisters.
Self-described feminists, with impressive journalistic credits on their resumes, Moore and Hopkinton structure the book by taking turns writing chapters. Nonetheless, Deconstructing Tyrone reads seamlessly, and with clarity in terms of tone and a singularity in perspective, as if the work of one person.
So, the only issue is whether you’re ready to hear these sage social scientists weigh-in about how “Black women have developed coping strategies” in dealing with their “tortured relationship” with hip-hop. For example, they are not exactly fond of Nelly for sliding a credit card through the anal cleft of a dancer as if he’s paying her for sex in his music video “Tip Drill.”
The fundamental question the book raises repeatedly, but in a myriad of ways, is “How can you love your culture, hip-hop, but love yourself, too?” Can a self-respecting Black woman embrace the typical Black male in spite of the gender frictions without capitulating and accepting the “video ho” label? Overall, the authors are surprisingly optimistic in their conclusions, since they ostensibly see their own fates as inextricably linked to African American mates, though they remain resolute in their refusal to be defined as sex objects to be impregnated and abandoned.
An excellent, urgent opus designed to initiate a healthy, long-overdue debate about the prospects and direction of the Hip-Hop Generation by exposing its prevailing male imagery as unacceptably misogynistic, and as more emasculated than macho.
The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing To Change Themselves and the World around Them, the Freedom Writers with Erin Gruwell, Broadway Books, ISBN # 978-0-7679-2490-0, $13.95.
“It is not what happens to us that matters, but how we deal with it—and the Freedom Writers are a perfect example. They could have chosen to fight racism with racism, hate with hate, pain with pain. But they did not.
If we all do what the Freedom Writers have done, and choose to deal with inhumane situations in a humane way, we can turn the world around and create positive lessons for ourselves and from others.”
-- Excerpted from The Foreword by Zlata Filipovic, survivor of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia’s civil war
First published in 1999, the recently re-released The Freedom Writers Diary was the result of high school teacher Erin Gruwell’s efforts to inspire her special-ed students to overcome any obstacles standing between them and their dreams. During the very first year of her tenure at Wilson High in Long Beach, California, Erin abandoned the orthodox approach suggested for her at-risk freshmen, and instead raised the bar by establishing high expectations for each and every one of them.
She did this despite the fact that most came from dysfunctional families stuck in an impoverished neighborhood. But, eventually, all 150 of her students graduated and went on to college. How did Gruwell achieve this enviable feat? By having them read two books, namely, The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and A Child’s Life by Zlata Filipovic, both gut-wrenching diaries kept by kids trapped in the most dire of circumstances.
In this way, Gruwell’s ghetto-bound teens could see that, as bad as their predicaments might appear, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. And she had them keep journals about the challenges in their own lives, and The Freedom Writers Diary is comprised of an assortment of touching entries by both the teacher and her talented students.
Is the book better than film? I’d say “Yes,” but isn’t that always the case? The movie was excellent, as is the text, so might I suggest this moving group memoir as a companion piece which only further augments an already satisfying cinematic experience.
