You’re almost out. Out of energy, ideas, motivation, totally depleted from all you’ve been doing lately. Seeing racism, acting against inequality, speaking out against it, fighting for your friends and family, it all takes a toll and when you’re just plain tired, you need something to help you focus. You need “Do the Work!” by W. Kamau Bell & Kate Schatz to energize you. So you’ve been fighting racism and, at this point, you’re simply “exhausted” over it all. This process isn’t easy and eliminating racism won’t happen overnight, but take a breath. This book is meant to help you…
Author: Terri Schlichenmeyer
Psychologists Who Changed the World’ Of course, you remember it, the weight of it in your hands, the way it fit your fingers, the envy of your peers, the pretending fun of it, and the security of knowing it would be waiting for you after school. Toys are essential in childhood, important in some adulthoods, and in the new book “What the Children Told Us” by Tim Spofford, they’re key in understanding racism and inequality. Kenneth and Mamie Clark had both grown up with the benefits that Black middle-class life bestowed on its members in the 1930s and ‘40s. Still,…
School will start soon, and you’re going to meet a lot of new kids. You’ll meet kids from other towns and maybe from other countries; some will have lighter hair and some will have darker skin. Maybe they will look like you, and maybe they won’t, so why not find out what’s different and interesting about those new kids by reading one (or all!) of these great books…. Do you know where your new classmates will live? In “My Town Mi Pueblo” by Nicholas Solis, illustrated by Luisi Uribe (Nancy Paulsen Books, $17.99) two cousins live very near one another,…
Sometimes, you just have to lay your burden down. When it’s heaviest, when your arms can’t support it and your back breaks from the weight of it, when your shoulders and your heart ache from it, release it. Let it go, let it be. Or, as in the new novel, “Our Gen” by Diane McKinney-Whetstone, ask a friend to lend a hand. Cynthia hated everything about the Sexagenarian, an over-55 complex to which she’d moved. She hated that her son and his wife had all but forced her to move there, that “The Gen” wasn’t her old house, and that…
Raise your voice in song. Let it carry to the skies, high notes above the clouds like so many birds in flight, low notes scraping the tips of the grass. Sing your happiness out loud, and let your sadness be carried softly to a better place. Raise your voice in song, even if, as in the new book “My Old Kentucky Home” by Emily Bingham, it sends someone else down. Stephen Foster was in a bad way. Unhappily married less than a year and father to a child he suspected wasn’t his, he struggled to do the right thing, by…
One hundred sixty-three. That’s how many friends you have on social media and you know most of them, one way or another. There are colleagues on your list, and cousins, friends, and a guy you don’t really remember meeting. You connected to them all somehow and you count them as friends or more. As in the new memoir, “Miss Chloe” by A.J. Verdelle, keeping in touch with them is always worth it. When her first novel was in its final stages before release, A.J. Verdelle sent out a few precious copies to trusted sources, and one of them made its…
You weren’t born knowing everything. People had to tell you what you needed to know, and that’s how you learn. You can guess sometimes, or figure other things out on your own but mostly, you’ve been told and then you know. So why not read these books about a fact that was unknown for years… When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and freed the slaves, the word was spread far and wide… except in Texas. For more than two years after the signing, there were still people in bondage there. In “Opal Lee and What It Means to Be…
A life well-lived. That’s what you want them to say when you’re gone: that you used up every shred of the time on Earth you were given, that you seized it from corner to corner and never wasted a minute. It’s an envious thing, to take advantage of your moments but in “Things Past Telling” by Sheila Williams, it’s not an easy thing, either. When she stayed silent, they thought she couldn’t hear, or was addled. But that wasn’t so. In her silence, one-hundred-twelve-year-old Maryam Priscilla Grace was remembering… As the middle child of her father’s second wife, with brothers…
Your children never miss a thing. Nothing escapes their notice. They watch below and overhead, spotting objects you’ve passed by a dozen times but never truly saw. From birth and beyond, they’re like sponges, observant and watchful and, as in the new book, “The Trayvon Generation” by Elizabeth Alexander, you wish for them better things to see. Though it’s been a four-hundred-year struggle, the number-one problem of this century, says Alexander, is still “the color line.” Generations have done “the race work,” but it remains an issue and she “both lament[s]” and is “enraged that… our young people still have…
There’s no one like you. For most of your life, you’ve been told how unique you are, how wonderful, how important, all true. You’re one of a kind, singular, you’re like no one else on Earth. And in the new book, “The First, The Few, The Only” by Deepa Purushothaman, that probably goes at work, too. Most workplaces were made for men. If you’re a woman, you already know this. It’s evident in the height of the counters, the number of permanent walls in the office, and the temperature of its rooms. But for Women of Color (WOC), that statement…