Greetings from Amazon.com Delivers Black Studies FEATURED IN THIS E-MAIL: * "Up From Slavery" by Booker T. Washington * "The Souls of Black Folk" by W.E.B. Du Bois, * "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin * "Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J.L. Chestnut, Jr." by J.L. Chestnut, Jr. and Julia Cass * "Lives in Between" by Leo Spitzer "Up from Slavery" by Booker T. Washington http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679640142/entertainmentsit Nineteenth-century African American businessman, activist, and educator Booker Taliaferro Washington's "Up from Slavery" is one of the greatest American autobiographies. Its mantras of black economic empowerment, land ownership, and self-help have inspired generations of black leaders, including Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan. In rags-to-riches fashion, Washington recounts his ascendance from early life as a mulatto slave in Virginia to a 34-year term as president of the influential agriculturally based Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. From that position, Washington reigned as the most important leader of his people, with slogans such as "Cast down your buckets," which emphasized vocational merit rather than the academic and political excellence championed by his contemporary rival W.E.B. Du Bois. Though many considered him too accommodating to segregationists, Washington, as he said in his historic "Atlanta Compromise" speech of 1895, believed that "political agitation alone would not save [the Negro]," and that "property, industry, skill, intelligence, and character" would prove necessary to black Americans' success. The potency of his philosophies are alive today in the nationalist and conservative camps that compose the complex quilt of black American society. "The Souls of Black Folks" by W.E.B. Du Bois http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679601872/entertainmentsit William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) is the greatest of African American intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal masterpiece, "The Souls of Black Folk," in 1903. With a dash of the Victorian and Enlightenment influences that peppered his impassioned yet formal prose, the book's largely autobiographical chapters take the reader through the momentous and moody maze of African American life after the Emancipation Proclamation: from poverty, the neoslavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, miseducation, and lynching, to the heights of humanity reached by the spiritual "sorrow songs" that birthed gospel and the blues. "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067974472X/entertainmentsit Novelist, playwright, and essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987) was the Holy Ghost in a trinity of African American writers that also included Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. "The Fire Next Time" is his most compelling account of what it means to be black in America. The slim book contains an eloquent letter to his namesake nephew, composed during the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, wherein Baldwin lays out the troubling and triumphant life that awaits him as an African American male. "This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you perish," he writes. "You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were born black and for no other reason." But what makes Baldwin's schooling of his young relative so compelling is the emphasis on honoring his black humanity without sinking into racial hatred. That lesson is repeated throughout the book, as Baldwin waxes philosophically on religion, nihilism, the Nation of Islam, and the future of the United States. His words are as true today as they were in the turbulent '60s. The preceding three books are among Amazon.com's choices for the 100 most important nonfiction books of the 20th century. To view the complete list online, visit the following page: Books of the century "Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J.L. Chestnut, Jr." by J.L. Chestnut, Jr. and Julia Cass http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374526885/entertainmentsit The infamous 1965 Bloody Sunday civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., put that sleepy segregated town into the national spotlight. An important, though lesser-known, figure in those events was J.L. Chestnut--a fiery, hometown, Howard University-trained lawyer who, through intelligence, force of will, and (in many cases) luck, managed to change the town's laws and attitudes. "Black in Selma," his unpretentious autobiography cowritten by Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Julia Cass, recalls Chestnut's lifelong battles with the brutal segregation enforced by whites, as well as underachievement, classism, miseducation, and pessimism among local blacks. Throughout the book, Chestnut reveals in ribald and revolutionary tones the complexities and contradictions of simultaneously working with the law and outside it. Overall, J.L. Chestnut's story is about how a people accustomed to injustice grew to fight for freedom with their lives. "After centuries of ducking and dodging," he writes, "black people have come out of the closet--and they liked the air." "Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginality in a Century of Assimilation" by Leo Spitzer http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0809016265/entertainmentsit The 19th century brought not only emancipation for black slaves, African colonials, and central-European Jews, it also ushered in an age of assimilation. How each of those groups approached that process is the focus of Leo Spitzer's well-researched work "Lives in Between." The author examines how three families--the West African Mays, the mulatto Reboucas of Brazil, and the Austrian Jewish Zweig-Brettauer clan--struggled to blend into dominant European cultures. Although Spitzer chronicles the cultural and political accomplishments of these families, what is of interest to him is how they all deal with their marginality to both the lower classes they avoid and the elite classes they desperately try to join. The range of responses to the failure of assimilation that Spitzer outlines reveals a complex social phenomenon whose repercussions are still being felt today. ****** Give the Perfect Gift -- Get the Perfect Gift Does Aunt Ida send polka CDs when you'd prefer pop? Create an Amazon.com Wish List and save everyone the agony of the unwanted gift. Wish list Clueless as to what to get your Kentucky cousin for Christmas? Send him an e-card and tell him to set up an Amazon.com Wish List so you can easily find and send him his heart's desire. Wish card ****** You'll find more great books, articles, excerpts, and interviews in Amazon.com's Nonfiction section at Nonfiction
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