December 2008 Reading List

Monday Dec 15, 2008 – By Clutch

  • Quicksand and Passing
    Nella Larson
  • Imperium In Imperio
    Sutton E. Griggs
  • 10 Bad Choices: That Ruin Black Women’s Life
    Grace Cornish
  • A Mercy
    Toni Morrison
  • The January Girl
    Goldie Taylor
  • Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart
    Alice Walker
  • Push
    Sapphire
  • White Oleander
    Janet Fitch (With)
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
    Junot Diaz
  • Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl - A Woman’s Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship
    Sherry Argov
  • Make It Happen
    Kevin Liles
  • Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women
    Courtney Martin
  • The Bluest Eye
    Toni Morrison
  • The Prophet
    Kahlil Gibran
  • Mama’s Girl
    Veronica Chambers

November 2008 Reading List

Saturday Nov 1, 2008 – By Clutch

  • The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow
    Walter Mosley
  • The Legs Are the Last to Go: Aging, Acting, Marrying, Mothering, and Other Things I Learned the Hard Way
    Diahann Carroll
  • Economic Gangsters
    Raymond Fisman
  • Eat This Not That
    Steve Lopez
  • Way I Am
    Eminem
  • Sound the Trumpet! : Messages to Empower African American Men
    Darryl D. Sims (Editor) , Cain Hope Felder (Foreword by)
  • Come on, People! : On the Path from Victims to Victors
    Bill Cosby, Alvin F. Poussaint, Alvin F. Poussaint
  • My American Journey
    Colin L. Powell, Joseph Persico (With)
  • Michelle : A Biography
    Liza Mundy
  • The Fire Next Time
    James Baldwin
  • Victoria’s Secret
    Jason Poole
  • Up To No Good
    Carl Weber
  • There Are No Children Here : The Story of Two Boys Growing up in the Other America
    Alex Kotlowitz
  • Gutter
    K’wan
  • The Snowball
    Alice Schroeder
  • Still Wifey Material (Wifey)
    Kiki Swinson
  • Finding Forever
    Keisha Ervin

October 2008 Reading List

Wednesday Oct 1, 2008 – By Clutch

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  • The Black List
    Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Elvis Mitchell
  • The Legs Are the Last to Go: Aging, Acting, Marrying, Mothering, and Other Things I Learned the Hard Way
    Diahann Carroll
  • Hiding in Hip Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry–From Music to Hollywood
    Terrance Dean
  • The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music
    Steve Lopez
  • Afeni Shakur: Evolution of a Revolutionary
    Jasmine Guy
  • Not Just the Levees Broke: My Story During and After Hurricane Katrina
    Phyllis Montana-Leblanc
  • Maybe You Never Cry Again
    Bernie Mac
  • Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self
    Rebecca Walker
  • Your Girlfriends Only Know So Much: A Brother’s Take on Dating and Mating for Sistas
    Finesse Mitchell
  • Nice Dreads: Hair Care Basics and Inspiration for Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Locking Their Hair
    Lonnice Brittenum Bonner
  • Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics
    Donna Brazile
  • The Go Green East Harlem Cookbook
    Scott M. Stringer (Editor)
  • Know Thyself
    Na’im Akbar
  • Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa
    Colin Grant
  • Dirty Red
    Vickie M. Stringer
  • The Street
    Ann Petry
  • Wild Seed
    Octavia E. Butler

Michelle: A Biography

Wednesday Oct 1, 2008 – By Clutch

She can be funny and sharp-tongued, warm and blunt, empathic and demanding. Who is the woman Barack Obama calls “the boss”? In Michelle, Washington Post writer Liza Mundy paints a revealing and intimate portrait, taking us inside the marriage of the most dynamic couple in politics today. She shows how well they complement each other: Michelle, the highly organized, sometimes intimidating, list-making pragmatist; Barack, the introspective political charmer who won’t pick up his socks but shoots for the stars. Their relationship, like those of many couples with two careers and two children, has been so strained at times that he has had to persuade her to support his climb up the political ladder. And you can’t blame her for occasionally regretting it: In this campaign, it is Michelle who has absorbed much of the skepticism from voters about Obama. One conservative magazine put her on the cover under the headline “Mrs. Grievance.”

Michelle’s story carries with it all the extraordinary achievements and lingering pain of America in the post-civil rights era. She grew up on the south side of Chicago, the daughter of a city worker and a stay-at-home mom in a neighborhood rocked by white flight. She was admitted to Princeton amid an angry debate about affirmative action and went on to Harvard Law School, where she was more comfortable doing pro-bono work for the poor than gunning for awards with the rest of her peers. She became a corporate lawyer, then left to train community leaders. She is modern in her tastes but likes to watch reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Brady Bunch.

In this carefully reported biography, drawing upon interviews with morethan one hundred people, including one with Michelle herself, Mundy captures the complexity of this remarkable woman and the remarkable life she has lived.

Naked Truth : Young, Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive

Wednesday Oct 1, 2008 – By Clutch


The surprisingly hopeful story of how a straight, nonpromiscuous, everyday girl contracted HIV and how she manages to stay upbeat, inspired, and more positive about life than ever before.

At nineteen years of age, Marvelyn Brown was lying in a stark white hospital bed at Tennessee Christian Medical Center, feeling hopeless. A former top track and basketball athlete, she was in the best shape of her life, but she was battling a sudden illness in the intensive care unit. Doctors had no idea what was going on. It never occurred to Brown that she might be HIV positive.

Having unprotected sex with her Prince Charming had set into swift motion a set of circumstances that not only landed her in the fight of her life, but also alienated her from her community. Rather than give up, however, Brown found a reason to fight and a reason to live.

The Naked Truth is an inspirational memoir that shares how an everyday teen refused to give up on herself, even as others would forsake her. More, it’s a cautionary tale that every parent, guidance counselor, and young adult should read.

One Fifth Avenue

Wednesday Oct 1, 2008 – By Clutch

Sex in the City goes middle-aged, mordant and slapstick in Bushnell’s chronicle of writers, actors and Wall Street whizzes clashing at One Fifth Avenue, a Greenwich Village art deco jewel crammed with regal rich, tarty upstarts and misguided lovers. When a “Queen of Society” dies, a vicious scramble for her penthouse apartment ensues, and it’s attorney Annalisa and her hedge-funder husband, Paul Rice, who land the palatial pad, roiling the building’s rivalries. There’s Billy Litchfield, an art dealer who slobbers over the wealthy; strivers Mindy and James Gooch, and their tech-savvy 13-year-old Sam, the most hilariously bitter (and strangely successful) family in the building; gossip columnist Enid Merle and her screenwriter nephew, Philip Oakland, who struggle to uphold traditions and their souls; actress Schiffer Diamond, who lands a hit TV series, and her old love; and Lola Fabrikant, a cunning Atlanta gold digger whose greatest ambition is to become Carrie Bradshaw. Here are bloggers and bullies, misfits and misanthropes, dear hearts and black-hearts, dogfights and catty squalls spun into a darkly humorous chick-lit saga.

Letter to My Daughter

Wednesday Oct 1, 2008 – By Clutch

For a world of devoted readers, a much-awaited new volume of absorbing stories and inspirational wisdom from one of our best-loved writers. Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou’s path to living well and living a life with meaning. Told in her own inimitable style, this book transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.

Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son.

Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a “lifelong endeavor,” or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice–Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family.

Like the rest of her remarkable work, Letter to My Daughter entertains and teaches; it is a book to cherish, savor, re-read, and share.

“I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I amspeaking to you all. Here is my offering to you.”

–from Letter to My Daughter

September 2008 Reading List

Monday Sep 1, 2008 – By Clutch

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  • Around the Way Girls
    LaJill Hunt, Dwayne S. Joseph
  • Mommy’s Angel
    Miasha
  • Feel the Fire
    Adrianne Byrd
  • And on the Eighth Day She Rested : A Novel
    J. D. Mason
  • Diary of a Groupie
    Omar Tyree
  • Parable of the Sower
    Octavia E. Butler
  • Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise
    Barack Obama
  • I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla : Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-Conscious World: A Guide for Parents and Teachers
    Marguerite Wright
  • The Beautiful Struggle : A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
    Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Black Sun Signs : An African-American Guide to the Zodiac
    Thelma Balfour, Simon & Schuster Fireside
  • Dust Tracks on a Road : An Autobiography
    Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou (Introduction)
  • The Go Green East Harlem Cookbook
    Scott M. Stringer (Editor)
  • Don’t Blame It on Rio : The Real Deal Behind Why Men Go to Brazil for Sex
    Jewel Woods, Karen Hunter
  • Promises to Keep
    Joe Biden
  • Soul Wisdom
    Zhi Gang Sha
  • Left to Die
    Lisa Jackson
  • Identical
    Ellen Hopkins

August 2008 Reading List

Friday Aug 1, 2008 – By Clutch

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  • The Power of Now
    Eckhart Tolle
  • Change Your Brain, Change Your Life
    Daniel G. Amen
  • When You Are Engulfed in Flames
    David Sedaris
  • Destini the Chocolate Princess
    Joan Lewis
  • The Mary Kay Way
    Mary Kay Ash
  • Parable of the Sower
    Octavia E. Butler
  • Dreams from My Father : A Story of Race and Inheritance
    Barack Obama
  • Black Girl/White Girl
    Joyce Carol Oates
  • Jack and Jill
    James Patterson
  • Small Steps
    Louis Sachar
  • Pink Slip
    Rita Ciresi
  • Someone Knows My Name
    Lawrence Hill
  • Good Hair
    Benilde Little
  • Dirty Red
    Vickie M. Stringer
  • Parable of the Sower
    Octavia E. Butler
  • Joy
    Victoria Christopher Murray
  • Witness
    Karen Hesse

Jubilee

Tuesday Jul 1, 2008 – By Clutch

7433189.jpgHere is the classic–and true–story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress, a Southern Civil War heroine to rival Scarlett O’Hara. Vyry bears witness to the South’s prewar opulence and its brutality, to its wartime ruin and the subsequent promise of Reconstruction. It is a story that Margaret Walker heard as a child from her grandmother, the real Vyry’s daughter. The author spent thirty years researching the novel so that the world might know the intelligent, strong, and brave black woman called Vyry. The phenomenal acclaim this best-selling book has achieved from readers black and white, young and old, attests to her success.

“Chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondage.”

Biography
Margaret Walker (1915-1998) was one of America’s most popular and respected African-American writers and scholars. She first gained national recognition with the 1942 poetry collection For My People, a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. She was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for her novel Jubilee, which became a national bestseller. Among the most formidable literary voices to emerge in the twentieth century, she will be remembered as one of the foremost transcribers of African American heritage.