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POINT OF VIEW
Recommended: Fiction
Airic and his famous televangelist wife, Trevelle Doval, make the evening news when Airic is accused of domestic battery and his life is suddenly turned upside down. But when Venus and Jake try to suspend Airic’s visitation rights with Mya, they discover that Airic isn’t willing to go down without a fight. Meanwhile, Jake’s best friend, Legend, turns up on his doorstep with trouble not far behind. The past is back with a vengeance, including blackmail, murder and enemies who are looking for payback. But everything takes a dangerous new turn when Venus goes missing. For Jake it’s now a race against time to save the woman he loves.
Kwan
Since she was a little girl, Tionna's on and off addicted mother taught her to get hers by any means necessary. Tionna's heart is as cold as a December chill, but she holds a warm place in it for Duhan, the father of her two sons, and her on-again-off-again boyfriend since they were teenagers. Duhan becomes her knight in shining armor until the government turns their dream into a nightmare. With Duhan behind bars and everything she loves seized she finds herself starting over in the same neighborhood she swore she'd never come back to. Back in the thick of things with her best friends Gucci, Boots and Tracy, she finds herself rediscovering her old life and suddenly begins to wonder if she's really cut out to be a prisoner's wife.
 Anna In-BetweenElizabeth Nunez Akashic Books, $22.95, 347pp ISBN-13: 9781933354842 ISBN: 1933354844
Anna, the novel’s main character who has a successful publishing career in the United States, is the daughter of an upper-class Caribbean family. While on vacation in the island home of her birth she discovers that her mother, Beatrice, has breast cancer. Beatrice categorically rejects all efforts to persuade her to go to the United States for treatment, even though it is, perhaps, her only chance of survival. Anna and her father, who tries to remain respectful of his wife’s wishes, must convince her to change her mind.
Teaming up with her mate and fellow Shadow Wolf, Max Hunter, Sasha tries to penetrate the paranormal community for clues. Meanwhile, members of the Wolf Clan are turning against one another as they race to uncover the meaning behind an ancient Unseelie curse. Even Sasha is not immune to this powerful magick, and soon finds herself drawn to a sensual, dangerous dance—one that could cost her own life…
Recommended: Nonfiction
of Sugar Ray Robinson
Born Walker Smith, Jr., in 1921, Robinson had an early childhood marked by the seething racial tensions and explosive race riots that infected the Midwest throughout the twenties and thirties. After his mother moved him and his sisters to the relative safety of Harlem, he came of age in the vibrant post-Renaissance years. It was there that—encouraged to box by his mother, who wanted him off the streets—he soon became a rising star, cutting an electrifying, glamorous figure, riding around town in his famous pink Cadillac. Beyond the celebrity, though, Robinson would emerge as a powerful, often controversial black symbol in a rapidly changing America.
POPS
Terry Teachout
Houghton Mifflin, $30, 512pp
ISBN: 978-0-15-101089-9
Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century and a giant of modern American culture. He knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts, wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies - without a collaborator - and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden. But offstage, Arm-strong could be introspective and vindictive. He was almost universally beloved, but had an explosive temper, and a larger-than-life personality far tougher and more sharp-edged than his worshiping fans ever knew. Terry Teachout has drawn on a cache of important new sources un-available to previous Armstrong biographers, including hundreds of private recordings of backstage and after-hours conversations that Armstrong made through-out the second half of his life, to craft a sweeping new narrative biography of this towering figure.
Recommended: Poetry
Sneed's poems are histories, written but maily unwritten, showing how social movements constructed around race, gender, and sexuality impact the individual. It is about family, ancestors and pioneers, healing, hope, and love. KONG shifts effortlessly between the comedic and the critical while never losing sight of the author's aim: to offer a work that is transformative, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.
LIBERATION NARRATIVES
Haki R. Madhubuti
Third World Press, $24.95, 516pp
ISBN: 978-0-88378-314-6
As the most comprehensive collection of Dr. Madhubuti's poetry, Liberation Narratives: New and Collected Poems 1966-2009 revisits work from popular volumes such as Don't Cry, Scream (1969); Earthquakes and Sunrise Missions (1984); Black Men (1991); Tough Notes: A Healing Call for Creating Exceptional Black Men (2002); and Run Toward Fear (2004), while a section titled "Liberation Narratives" offers new poems for 2009. Included is a tribute to the late Studs Turkel, repudiations of the Bush administration, musings on the election of America's first Black president, and a number of other gems.
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RECOMMENDED READING
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HBF Publishing Seminars
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To judge from most of the commentary on the Gates-Crowley affair, you would think that a "black elite" has gotten dangerously out of hand. First Gates (Cambridge, Yale, Harvard) showed insufficient deference to Crowley, then Obama (Occidental, Harvard) piled on to accuse the police of having acted "stupidly." Was this "the end of white America" which the Atlantic had warned in a recent cover story? r
Nappily in Bloom
Section 8
Cursed to Death
SWEET THUNDER: The Life and Times
KONG AND OTHER WORKS
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