Check out PBS's EGALITE FOR ALL with author Laurent Dubois

Friday, January 30, 2009; PBS

EGALITE FOR ALL:

Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution

It was the only successful slave insurrection in history. It grasped the full meaning of French revolutionary ideas — liberté, eqalité, fraternité — and used them to create the world's first Black republic. It changed the trajectory of colonial economics...and led to America's acquisition of the Louisiana territory from France. "It" was the Haitian Revolution, a movement that's been called the true birth moment of universal human rights. Vaguely remembered today, the Haitian Revolution was a hurricane at the turn of the nineteenth century — traumatizing Southern planters and inspiring slaves and abolitionists, worldwide.

Égalité for All: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution explores this history through music, voodoo ritual, powerful re-creations, and insightful writers and historians.

To watch Egalite For All, check your local listings.

Richard Thompson Ford Reviews WHAT OBAMA MEANS in Washington Post

Reviewed by Richard Thompson Ford
Sunday, January 18, 2009; Washington Post

WHAT OBAMA MEANS

For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future

By Jabari Asim

Morrow. 223 pp. $21.99

Barack Obama's historic struggle to become the nation's first black president is over, but the fight over the meaning of his victory has only begun.

In What Obama Means -- one of what will certainly be many efforts to interpret and define the Obama phenomenon -- Jabari Asim argues that Obama's victory is the culmination of decades of black political struggle, social advancement and cultural achievement. Obama promises to continue this cultural transformation with a new style of racial politics: more productive and less antagonistic than that of the "charlatans and camera hogs with whom we are all too familiar" (a group in which the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson figure prominently) but no less committed to social justice. Asim, editor of the NAACP's journal the Crisis and former deputy editor of Book World, insists that Obama is the latest and most inspiring of a long line of "dedicated champions of black advancement." Because of Obama "it's becoming cool to be thoughtful, temperate and monogamous," writes Asim, and Americans "may come to associate blackness with brilliance, thoughtfulness, confidence, and radical optimism."

By contrast, Obama's detractors, left and right, have suggested that the new president inevitably will be limited by the racial politics of the past. Last year the conservative commentator Shelby Steele argued in A Bound Man that Obama was tethered, by his liberal ideology and racial loyalty, to a counterproductive politics of grievance that exaggerates white racism and denies the need for individual responsibility among blacks. By contrast, left-leaning black social commentators such as Cornel West, Tavis Smiley and Jesse Jackson have complained that, to win elections, Obama pandered to white voters, ignoring his responsibility to blacks.

For the rest of Richard Thompson Ford's review, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE in Reader's Digest

Readers Digest, February 2009

Great New Books of February 2009

Looking for a great new novel, short story or science read? Check out our picks for the best-bet books of February.

History
Her husband was not black. He was not from the West Indies. He was not a steelworker. Even his name, James Todd, was a lie. Ada Todd was in fact married to Clarence King, an acclaimed public figure and the person Secretary of State John Hay once called "the best and brightest man of his generation." … [But] not until he lay dying of tuberculosis in Phoenix in late 1901 … did James Todd write a letter to his wife telling her who he really was.
--Passing Strange: a gilded age tale of love and deception across the color line by Martha A. Sandweiss (Penguin Press, $27.95)

For the rest of the reviews, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in Library Journal

Library Journal, 1/15/2009

Sandweiss, Martha A. Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. Penguin Pr.: Penguin Group (USA). Feb. 2009. c.358p. index. ISBN 978-1-59420-200-1. $27.95. HIST

American West historian Sandweiss (American studies & history, Amherst Coll.; Print the Legend) utilizes archival, newspaper, and a panoply of digitized resources to analyze the personal and social complexity of the life of noted surveyor and geologist Clarence King (1842–1901). King, the scion of a storied white New England family, passed as the purported Pullman porter James Todd in order to espouse his African American common-law wife, Ada Copeland Todd King. Unlike previous King biographers (e.g., Robert Wilson, The Explorer King), Sandweiss treats in detail the challenges and dilemmas that King confronted in post-Civil War America, even in relatively tolerant New York City. Balancing scholarly exploration with readability, she focuses on King's 13-year secret (until he was on his deathbed, King kept the fact of his actual race from his wife), which produced acute psychological strains. History learned of it with a legal claim for his trust fund in 1933. Sandweiss demonstrates just how racial identity and inequality circumscribes behavior, adding both general background and individual perspectives on the conundrum of race in America. Her literary references add to a historical narrative that should catch the attention of both specialists and the reading public. A welcome choice for both academic and public libraries.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress

For other reviews, click here.

Kaufman Field Guid Gets Lolz with Lolcats

more animals
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/01/02/funny-pictures-dat-one-comes-in-four-flavorz/