Your teeth got a good workout. Yep, as a kid, you wanted those certain hard-to-find, favorite-player baseball cards but you didn’t want to be wasteful. Because you’d do anything to get the cards, you spent your change, hoped you’d be lucky, and you chewed a lot of gum. In the new book “Comeback Season” by Cam Perron (with Nick Chiles), though, the best things don’t come in a pack. It all started with coins. When Cam Perron was a little boy, his grandfather introduced him to coin collecting by taking young Perron to a local Massachusetts flea market, where the…
Author: Terri Schlichenmeyer
This really makes your blood boil. This. The racism gone amok, discrimination, the protests that don’t seem to work, nobody’s listening. You’re hot under the collar over it all, totally inflamed, ready for real action, and in “This Is the Fire” by Don Lemon, you’ll find some sometimes-warm, sometimes-scorching thoughts to sit with first. Coincidentally or not, as a trial begins soon in Minnesota, this book opens with a poignant letter from Lemon to his young nephew on the evening of George Floyd’s death. Lemon writes of the legacy he got from his parents, his grandmother, and his beloved older…
Keep your eyes open. Don’t blink. Sometimes, that fraction of a second is all you need to miss something. Blink, and you may wonder if it really happened, or if you just think it did. Blink again, and you just don’t know. So keep them peepers open because, as in the new novel “Blood Grove” by Walter Mosley, bad things can happen in a… From the hollow look in his eyes, it was obvious that the skinny, nervous white man standing before Easy Rawlins was a veteran. The guy, Craig Kilian, sported a bruise on his left temple and a…
A couple weeks ago, you really needed to wrap up in some extra blankets. One layer, two layers, covered face and a cold nose. Extra blankets, extra sweaters, coats, socks, gloves, it took awhile to thaw yourself out and in “The Fabric of Civilization” by Virginia Postrel, you’ll see where those snuggly wraps started. Many thousand years ago – long before your need for insulated gloves and a knitted hat – the tale of textiles began when early humans invented string. But string, as Postrel points out, “is not cloth.” Nope, and it takes a lot of gathering to obtain…
Who are you? That’s a question some people never ask themselves: seemingly intuitively, they know the answer at birth and they don’t think about it again. Then there are those who struggle with knowing until their last breath. Still One big secret-not-secret lies at the heart of “Raceless” by Georgina Lawton. Born after a long labor in a London hospital in 1989, Lawton was the child of a (white) British father and a (white) Irish mother, and with her black hair and deep brown eyes, she “was not the baby they had been expecting.” To save face, her conception, the…
Man, you’re picky. That’s not always a bad thing, either. You know what you want so you choose deliberately, carefully, with plenty of thought behind it. What’s right for you is right for you and you won’t take anything less. As in the new memoir “Just As I Am” by Cicely Tyson (with Michelle Burford), folks’ll just have to deal with it. Born in New York City a few days before Christmas 1924, Cicely Tyson’s first real memory was of a place, one where her parents fought, physically and verbally, over her father’s infidelities. She was sensitive to everything she…
When you’re a kid, there are so many things to learn. Someone has to teach you your A-B-Cs, and to count to a hundred. You have to learn to tie a knot and set the table and stay safe. And this month, you should learn more about Black History, and that can be fun with these great books… For the littlest reader ages 3 to 5, “The ABCs of Black History” by Rio Cortez, illustrated by Lauren Semmer is a great way to start the lesson. This most fundamental book includes holidays, cities, people, and music that forms the base…
You can never go home. Imagine it: the people you love, your room, your pets, you couldn’t see them again. No more hanging with your friends, no more grabbing a soda at your favorite store. How would you feel if you were told that you have to stay away now, all because – as in the new book “Finding a Way Home” by Larry Dane Brimner – you fell in love with someone whose skin didn’t match yours? Richard Loving never set out to find a wife but, growing up in Central Point, Virginia, he knew a lot of girls,…
One step at a time. That’s how you get anywhere: methodical, with purpose, one foot in front of the other until you get where you’re going. You never waver. You never take shortcuts, side roads, or easy-outs, and as in “Kamala’s Way” by Dan Morain, you keep your eyes on the goal every minute of the journey. At this point in time, Kamala Harris almost needs no introduction. Much of what you need to know is summed up in this: says Morain, she “misses little and forgets even less.” Still, a lot of things about her life were left out…
You don’t have time to do a rhyme. Or maybe you do, although you know that poetry doesn’t necessarily have to rhyme. Sometimes, a poem is a story made of words your heart sings. You can say a poem, you can rap one, or you can read one so why not read a few in these great poetry books… A little of this, a little of that, and stories that aren’t poems are found in “Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose” by Nikki Giovanni. Readers who are fans of Giovanni’s are in for a treat here: As you’d expect from…