National Read A Book Day on September 6, 2016

September 6, 2016: National Read a Book Day

Highlighted Book of the Month

The Adventures of Tume The Tug Boat: Tume Visits New York City with his new friend Speed by Monique Brown, ISBN: 978-1534980655: Tume’s Tug Boat Adventures series was created for children of all ages and will help readers understand other cultures, develop an appreciation of history, and increase curiosity while enhancing the reader’s geographic awareness.

Some books of interest to expand your mind outside of the usual authors you may have read.  It’s good to stick with what you know and use to reading, but after a while the research becomes dated and new sources are needed or improved upon to reinforce what you read or question it.  Here are a few books I picked out that would be great reading material for the fall and winter.

1. Facets of Power: Politics, Profits and People in the making of Zimbabwe’s Blood Diamonds by Richard Saunders and Tinashe Nyamunda: In March 2016, President Robert Mugabe announced that the mining companies his ministers had licensed and whose concessions he had personally approved, had acted like robbers, engaging in ‘swindling’ and ‘smuggling’, and making off with the lion’s share of Marange’s diamond wealth. Less than $2 billion of the more than $15 billion which was estimated to have been earned by diamond mining firms since 2012 had been remitted to government, the President said. – See more at: http://www.readafricanbooks.com/extracts/facets-of-power#sthash.ogo8OqPn.dpuf
2. Pre-Order: The Confessions of Nat Turner: and Related Documents by Kenneth S. Greenberg, ISBN: 978-1319064860: Twenty years after the publication of the first edition of this volume, Nat Turner and the rebels of 1831 remain central figures in American culture. Kenneth S. Greenberg’s revised introduction updates the role of Nat Turner in American memory and also includes the latest scholarship on topics such as the importance of neighborhoods to the community of enslaved people and the role of women in resisting enslavement. New to this edition is a significant excerpt from David Walker’s 1830 Appeal – a radical attack on slavery from a Boston based African American intellectual that circulated near the area of the rebellion and echoed key themes of The Confessions of Nat Turner. The Appeal will compel students to ponder the question of Turner’s connection to a larger African American liberation movement.
3. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory by Kenneth Greenberg, ISBN: 978-0195177565: Kenneth S. Greenberg gathers twelve distinguished scholars to offer provocative new insight into the man, his rebellion, and his time, and his place in history. The historians here explore Turner’s slave community, discussing the support for his uprising as well as the religious and literary context of his movement. They examine the place of women in his insurrection, and its far-reaching consequences (including an extraordinary 1832 Virginia debate about ridding the state of slavery). Here are discussions of Turner’s religious visions–the instructions he received from God to kill all of his white oppressors.
4. Black Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature by Andrea Stone, ISBN: 0813062578: At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized Black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability.
5. The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt by Patrick H. Breen, ISBN: 978-0199828005:  Breen shows how, as whites regained control, slaveholders created an account of the revolt that saved their slaves from white retribution, the most dangerous threat facing the slaveholders’ human property. By probing the stories slaveholders told that allowed them to get non-slaveholders to protect slave property, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood reveals something surprising about both the fragility and power of slavery.
6. May I have this Dance by Connie Manse Ngcaba: I finished writing this book at the age of 84. I am a mother of six and a grandmother to twenty-two grandchildren. This story is about my life during the various stages of my growth. It is the story of the young Manse, the girl who had to grow up quickly, then fell in love and got married. It is a story of Mama, the wife and mother. It is the story of MaHlongwane, the community worker, and it is the story of Makhulu, the grandmother and matriarch of the Ngcaba family. – See more at: http://www.readafricanbooks.com/extracts/may-i-have-this-dance#sthash.xJicuKvN.dpuf
7. Who Owns Haiti?: People, Power, and Sovereignty by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman, ISBN: 9780813062266: This book explores the role of international actors in Haiti’s sovereign affairs while highlighting the ways in which Haitians continually enact their own independence on economic, political, and cultural levels. Thus, contributing authors contemplate Haiti’s sovereign roots from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including political science, anthropology, history, economics, and development studies.
8. What Colonialism Ignored: ‘African Potentials’ for Resolving Conflicts in Southern Africa by Sam Moyo and Yoichi Mine: When such a universal and prescriptive intervention fails to function, it is concluded that the African people are to be blamed for their lack of receptivity and execution. Disregarding the fact that these approaches derive from the ethos of Western modernisation, it has been the general tendency not only to neglect non-Western methods for realising peace, but to exclude them. International interventions seem to be based on the understanding that the African societies are ‘deficient’. The irony is that the conflict resolution interventions by the international community have largely ended in failure. – See more at: http://www.readafricanbooks.com/extracts/extracts-one#sthash.evzMTlXm.dpuf
9. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Sarah Haley, ISBN: 1469627590: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned Black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Subjugated as convict laborers and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, Black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement.
10. The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Education, Discipline, and Racialized Double Standards by Nancy A. Heitzeg, ISBN: 1440831114: This book offers a research and comparison-driven look at the school-to-prison pipeline, its racial dynamics, the connections to mass incarceration, and our flawed educational climate―and suggests practical remedies for change. Thus it also: provides readers with an understanding of the realities of the school-to prison pipeline―its history, development, and racialized context and meaning―as well as the continued significance of race and other socially differentiating factors in shaping public policy and everyday decisions regarding “deviance,” “discipline,” and social control.