Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE nominated for New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009

New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009: High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
New York Public Library, February 5, 2009

Alongside Jane Mayer and Robin Wright, Peter Gosselin's High Wire was selected by the New York Public Library as a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism for 2009. Winners will be announced on May 6, 2009 at a reception at the library.

To see latest updates, including other nominees, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in Columbia Journalism Review

Reviewed by Elinore Longobardi
Wednesday, February 4, 2009; Columbia Journalism Review

PASSING STRANGE

A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

By Martha Sandweiss

Penguin Press. 384 pp. $27.95

Passing Strange is one of those books with precisely the right title. It is indeed a story about passing, in every sense of the term, and historian Martha Sandweiss tells it with a scholar’s rigor and a storyteller’s verve. More specifically, it is a story about a white. nineteenth-century scientist and explorer, famous in his day, who both hobnobbed with the most prominent figures of his era and created a second, secret identity for himself as a working-class black man. In a word: strange.

Shockingly—at least from the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, with all of its peering eyes—the twain never met. Not, at least, until the prominent white man who passed as an obscure black one was on his deathbed. Knowing just this much, the reader will be asking a good many questions, chiefly variations on the basic How? and Why? Sandweiss rewards us with answers. Not to every question, of course, given the number of details that have slipped between the cracks of time. Still, the author builds the solid framework of two lives: that of Clarence King, the explorer, and Ada Copeland, the black woman he loved, married, and all the while deceived.

The story of King and Copeland, who lived together as James and Ada Todd, is a blessing for a curious, talented writer like Sandweiss. Not only are its details fascinating in and of themselves, but they advance a larger social understanding. By tracing the curves and improbable intersections of two extraordinary lives, Passing Strange offers a fresh look at the racial and cultural landscape of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

For the rest of Elinore Longobardi's review, click here.

James Galbraith, author of THE PREDATOR STATE, guest on KCRW's Stimulating the Economy, Now and in the Future

Thursday, February 5, 2009; KCRW News

Stimulating the Economy, Now and in the Future

Stimulating the Economy, Now and in the Future (12:07P)

The President and the Congress are prepared to break records for government spending, with consequences for America and the rest of the world. The stimulus package is supposed to move fast enough to have immediate impact, but not so fast that it's reckless or wasteful. The House bill calls for prohibiting foreign steel and iron from infrastructure projects. The Senate version being debated this week goes further, with few exceptions to the requirement for American-made goods and equipment. Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, call that "protectionism." Could such provisions lead to foreign retaliation? Do other elements advance the Democrats' social agenda, rather than focusing on creating jobs. What should be the long-term objectives? Can past levels of growth and prosperity be restored or will Americans have to tighten their belts permanently?

To listen to Stimulating the Economy, click here for the podcast.

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN nominated for Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Artists Awards 2008: The Book of Getting Even
Barnes & Noble, February 3, 2009

Alongside Zachary Lazar and Gin Phillips, Benjamin Taylor's The Book of Getting Even was selected by Barnes & Noble as a fiction finalist for the Discover Great New Writers Award for 2008. Featuring notable judges such as Kate Christensen and Suzanne Finnamore, winners will be announced on March 4, 2009 at a private awards ceremony.

To see the full list, click here.

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.