1 comments about All the Pashas Men: Mehmed Ali His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt.

1. This book presents a well researched alternative to the usual 'nationalist' view of Mohamed Ali as the founder of the modern Egyptian state. While not arguing the undeniable modernizing influence of Ali's reforms, the author argues convincingly that his motives were dynastic as opposed to nationalistic.

   A must read for either Egyptian, Ottoman or military history buffs.

No comments about Ella Fitzgerald - The First Lady of Song (Biography).

2 comments about Growing up in Mississippi.

1. In all of the chaos and confusion of an ordinary day, someone with a heart full of lessons to share holds the magic formula for couples to survive and fall in love with being in love all over again. Never have I fancied reading a book on relationships with such joy as from Bertha M. Davis, a masterful writer, shares over 40 years of experience on the "good and bad" of relationships.
   
   Through all of her own pitfalls and personal triumphs, she is able to encourage the reader to compromise and "literally" grow up. There is much to learn, and even for those in fledgling relationships, Bertha's book, "Marriage and The Family," should be the anthem or perfect gift for a bridal shower or wedding. All bridal shops would prosper with Bertha's book that rings like sweet wine, but instead the only intoxicating message is "learn to stay in love." When couples are able to react maturely to even the worst of situations, love can remain everlastingly. Just ask Bertha who understands that marriage means, "a permanent bond," between two people. She reiterates the meaning of "LOVE." and instructs couples before saying, "I DO!" Bertha wastes no time spelling out the statistics on rapid divorce rates. The country has failed this test.
   
   Every couple is vulnerable to the rising trend. Thank goodness for Bertha's clever remedies such as spending time together, learning to love yourself, appreciate the art of maturing, and most of all, rearing children to uphold the same values which may be the culprit for increasing divorce rates. Our adults today are kids all grown up who are the products of young parents who may have compromised going out to work to put food on the table for spending quality time with kids.
   
   Not to worry, Bertha is not here to wreak havoc on our young souls as a woman of marriage for many years but rather lend all of us , and including the children, a kind of mother wit that unsurprisingly grandparents can provide as young lings grow into independent teens and young adults. Any married couple should consider reading Bertha's book together.
   
   After all, we want our children to see us as role models and be on their way to college, or look out for problems later on as Bertha also, sheds light on the repercussions of neglecting youth who waywardly could end up in prison and resorting to drugs and crime if we don't collectively strive to fulfill our responsibilities as adults. "Love and Marriage" is an outstandingly well written book that acknowledges every minuscule ingredient of a successful marriage, and while all doesn't always turn out to be a fairytale, "Bertha's Ten Commandments of Marriage"as well as her scripture references on marriage, may very well be the next constitution to save this country, for social order begins with healthy families. Bravo to Bertha Davis, a lady who I have no doubt will take the seminar segment by storm with her new book, "Marriage and Family."



2. "On April 10, in the small town of Webb in the Mississippi Delta, I, Bertha M. Davis was born to Victoria M. Thomas, a single mother of four...." So begins the story of Betha Davis's life in Growing Up in Mississippi.
   
   
   Growing Up in Mississippi is a true story about a young girl growing up in the south when segregation was alive and well; African Americans were labeled Negroes; and picking cotton was one of the only ways to make a living.
   
   
   Textbooks and school curriculum can't possibly begin to teach the struggles many black men and women faced during this time. Reading Growing Up in Mississippi not only gave me a glimpse of the hardship they suffered, it also displayed the relationship and camaraderie they each shared as well.
   
   In the story, Davis primarily focuses on her childhood and her relationship with her mother and siblings. Often moving from plantation to plantation offered Davis access to many interesting people including plantation owner, Mr. Johnson; the kindhearted Mrs. Fisher; and the scandalous Jenny.
   Reading this book transformed my views on the history of the South. Davis wrote about many topics that I believe they'd never attempt to teach in school. I think people of all ages and races will benefit from reading Growing Up in Mississippi.
   
   
   
   Reviewed by Joy Farrington
   
   
   
   Joy Farrington is the founder and president of Nubian Sistas Book Club, Inc. and resides in South Florida. www.nubiansistas.org

No comments about White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas: Coming of Age Black in White America.

3 comments about Fleet Walker's Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball's First Black Major Leaguer.

1. It will come as a surprise to most baseball enthusiasts, but Jackie Robsinson was not the first African-American to play baseball in a major league. That honor fell to Moses Fleetwood Walker who achieved college baseball stardom while a student at Oberlin College in the 1880s. But Walker was expelled from professional baseball because of the devastating and pervasive racism of the day, including ill treatment by his team mates, his opponents on the field, and Cap anson, a star of the Chicago White Stockings, who drove Walker and the few other African-Americans in the major leagues out of the game, where blacks wanting to play baseball formed the Negro League teams and were excluded from the major league teams until Robinson's barrier breaking inclusion so many years later into the exclusive club that was professional major league baseball. Walker was more than just a gifted baseball player. In addition to being an outstanding athlete, he was also an inventor, a civil rights activist, an author, and an entrepreneur. Born on October 7, 1856 in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, Walker died on May 11, 1924 in Cleveland, Ohio. "Fleet Walker's Divided Heart" is a superbly written and enthusiastically recommended biography by David W. Zang of a truly remarkable life filled with accomplishment and frustration, triumph and tragedy, and which now has made into an audiobook CD featuring the impressive narrative talents of Andrew L. Barnes.



2. David W. Zang's "Fleet Walker's Divided Heart" is a detailed biography of a talented, tormented, late 19th century catcher: Moses Fleetwood Walker--America's first black major league baseball player. "Fleet" Walker was born in Mt Pleasant, Ohio on Wednesday, October 7, 1857. This simple fact is mentioned on the first page of "Divided Heart." It is from this unassuming birthday that Zang begins his interesting, but confusing, discussion fo Fleet Walker. After mentioning Walker's birth, Zang tries to explain how Walker's life follows the lines of the nursery rhyme: "Monday's child is fair of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace, Wednesday's child is full of woe, Thursday's child has far to go......" According to Zang, "it might have appeared that [Walker's mother], a midwife, used the nativity as a practicum and elected to give birth across the first four days of the week."(2) Following this, Zang attempts to connect the sixty-nine years of Walker's life to the nursery rhyme by saying " For as sure as he carried a full measure of woe, Fleet Walker was unquestionably fair of face, full of grace, and possessed of an ambition that would banish his dreams to distant places....Walker had overwhelmed the simplistic prophecies of the nursery thyme to such an extent that the possibility of a four-day birthing could not be dismissed out of hand(2)." This is only one of many, needless, airy speculations (as another reviewer called them) that wander from the solid facts of Walker's life. Because of these, the true essence of the man, Fleet Walker, is lost in "Divided Heart." The facts of Walker's life are intereting enough without Zang's meandering commentaries. Throughout the book, Zang points to several beliefs he has about Fleetwood Walker. He believes that Walker had a "divided heart," as he puts it; but he never pointedly explains what he believes this divided heart to be. The reader is left to wonder if the divided heart existed because Walker was considered a mulatto (mixed race of black and white), or if the divided heart existed because Walker wanted to belong to the white race and to the black race, but never fully belonged to either. Sometimes, the "divided heart" seems to belong to the author, who never fully explains why the story of Walker's life should be important to a reader today. After reading, it might be difficult for the reader to understand the importance, too. Walker was, indeed, the first black man to play major league baseball. He played collegiate baseball for Oberlin College in 1881, and for Michigan University in 1882. He also played professionally for the minor league New Castle, Pennsylvania, Neshannocks. When Walker began playing for the Toledo ball club of the Northwester League in 1883, the state was set for him to become the first black major league baseball player. How was this possible? In 1884, the Toledo club joined the American Association. At the time, the American Association was considered a major league. In a brief, but unusually clear way, Zang explains the process: "The American Association had been formed in the winter of 1881 with the avowed intent to become a major league rival to the National League, a status it won with an 1882 agreement meant to keep them from raiding National League rosters(40)." Because of the agreement, Walker became the first black major league baseball player. Due to injuries, Walker lasted only one season with Toledo. He never again played major league baseball, nor did any other black man until Jackie Robinson on April 15, 1947. After the first two chapters, which explain Walker's rise and fall from major league baseball, Zang shows how Walker's life turned into an aimless, but somewhat successful life of entrepreneurship, invention, race theory, and jail time. He played more baseball for some minor league teams, ending his career with the Syracuse Stars in 1889. Afterward, according to Zang, Walker did "temporarily lose the attention that had been his... he would reclaim it in dramatic and unhappy ways." Walker became a mail clerk, a murder defendant, a convicted mail thief, an inventor, an author on the subject of repatriation of blacks to Africa, and an opera house owner. Generally, the state of Ohio is shown to be a hospitable home to a black man in the late 1800's. Zang excels in showing the history of Ohio's Quaker population's rejection of racism, and in showing how Walker thrived in several businesses in different towns in Ohio. The last two chapters show how much affection Zang has for Walker. Zang's details in the end give some needed energy to Walker's story. Zang even explains the cost of the lid for Walker's casket. Unfortunately, Zang's writing does not follow a chronological timeline closely enough to be easily read. For clarity's sake, the reader will turn pages back and forth to put events in some order--a job usually fulfilled by an author. "Fleet Walker's Divided Heart" is a complicated, detailed biography of a complicated, historical figure. Too bad Zang never explains "WHY?"



3. To properly understand the Twentieth Century American civil rights movement, one must understand how and why a similar movement failed during the Reconstruction years following the Civil War. Likewise with baseball history--to properly appreciate Jackie Robinson breaking the major league color line in 1947, one must understand the less salutary 1884 experience of Moses Fleetwood "Fleet" Walker.

   Walker, born of middle class mixed-race parents in Ohio in 1857, attended and played baseball at integrated colleges in the early 1880's. In 1883 he left school to pursue a professional career with the minor league Toledo Blue Stockings. Baseball teams of the era determined whether to employ African Americans on a team-by-team basis, and Walker's presence on Toledo drew only occasional attention from fans and opponents.

   In 1884 the major league American Association absorbed Toledo as an expansion team. Walker, by then an excellent defensive catcher, followed his team into the Association to become the first black major leaguer. Injuries hobbled Walker, however, and eventually cut his season short. The Toledo club folded after the season.

   Walker returned to the minor leagues in 1885, but faced hardening racial prejudice which blocked his return to the majors. In 1889 the minor International League, in which Walker then played, joined the majors in adopting an unwritten, unofficial color line. By then Walker's career was winding down anyway.

   Walker's subsequent life defies easy characterization. He patented four inventions, published a book, and owned a successful opera house--but also struggled with alcohol, served jail time for stealing from the U.S. mails, and stood trial (but won acquittal) for his role in a knife fight.

   Author Zang integrates Walker's varying experiences into the larger mosaic of declining race relations in the America of his era. Indeed, Zang often ventures too far from the facts of Walker's life--interesting enough in their own right--into airy sociological speculation. He perhaps over-emphasizes Walker's mixed-race parentage as bringing about the "divided heart" of his title. His book nonetheless serves as a valuable testimonial to a fascinating and forgotten life.

No comments about The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume IV: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957-December 1958 (Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr).

No comments about Servants of the People: The 1960s Legacy of African American Leadership.

No comments about The Seed of Sally Good'N: A Black Family in Arkansas, 1833-1953.

5 comments about The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts.

1. This book touched me to the core! Catherine's story is searingly honest, human, passionate and moving. Inspite of being extremely busy I could not put it down from the time it was delivered until 3am when I had finished it. This tour de force not only addresses issues of adoption, identity, race and prejudice but also how one's environment and circumstances affect one's own perception of events and experiences. It is the best book I have read in years!



2. Catherine went searching for the truth and she found it. It was reality and not a made up story with a happy ending. I believe that she was very self serving in telling the story. I felt she did not really appreciate the parents who raised her, until the very end. I wondered how they felt after reading this book. She certainly laid out all her complaints about them. I personally could relate to her mother, who was doing the very best she could for a rather unappreciative daughter.
   On the other hand, I think I gained some insight to what it was like to grow up black in a white world, not easy at all. I'm glad she was able to tell this story with as much depth and clarity as she did.
   This story also brings to light the plight of the children of a middle class woman who had several children and didn't choose to acknowledge or care for them. What about birth control? Yes, she was mentally ill, but I wonder if we can excuse her for that.
   
   In the last several years I have done the research that reunited my husband (in his 60's) with the birth mother who gave him up. The search was very interesting and it was a miracle how it all came together. The story has a bittersweet ending, since his birth mother passed away within a year of their reunion.
   
   This is a great story and I couldn't put it down.



3. It can be hard enough to come to terms with family and identity when one is not adopted. Imagine growing up the transracial adoptee of a white family in a tiny working class town in rural Massachusetts (read: all white). Moreover, you are biracial and subject to putdowns and jibes by "full-blooded" members of your race. This background makes up the first part of Catherine McKinley's compulsively readable memoir. The second part is her search for her roots, and her reckoning when she finds those roots and they are not quite what she expected.

   McKinley has a superb ear for dialogue and mood. Moreover, The Book of Sarahs is so full of suprises that sometimes it's like reading a thriller. McKinley starts out by giving us her fantasy of her birth mother that carried her through her youth (most adoptees have one)...and part of the fun of the book is seeing just how different reality is from her fantasy, again and again. McKinley also writes with wonderful humor and subtle characterizations that make it difficult to dislike anyone in her book despite their foibles. Finally, I can't agree with other reviewers that McKinley was cruel to her adoptive family. Her adoptive parents clearly understood her journey, and by the end of the book she intimated that she had resolved her issues with them.

   Don't miss this one...one of the best I've read this year!




4. This book tells the tale of Catherine McKinley's search for her birth parents. McKinley, who is biracial, was adopted at birth. Brought up in a White family, she found herself drawn towards African American culture in her search for building her own identity. As an adult, questions about who she was and how she came to be gradually took over the focus of her life. In this book, she details how she searched for her birth parents and eventually found them, as well as other family members.

   From reading the blurb on the back cover of the book, I had expected the book to focus more on McKinley's experiences of growing up as an adopted biracial child. I have very little experience myself with issues relating to adoption, and I had no idea how consuming the questions of identity and family can be for an adopted child. Prospective adoptive parents might learn quite a bit from this book about how adopted children may have an unquenchable thirst for knowing their birth parents, a thirst that can taint relationships between them and their adopted family members if not handled appropriately. Adoptees, on the other hand, may be quite interested to read how McKinley proceeded in her search, and how the results of her search compared with her dreams. The emotional issues concerning adoption are never easy to reconcile; after all, every adoption starts with a tragedy that has resulted in parents having to give up their children. The children and all of their parents, both adopted and birth, must spend the remainder of their lives putting the pieces back together.




5. I beg to differ with some of the other customer reviews posted for The Book of Sarahs. Reality is messy. Members of the adoption triad--birthparents, adoptees, and adoptive parents--share a complicated, emotionally charged relationship from the moment the adoptee is born. There are one thousand and one reasons why birthmothers feel that relinquishment is the best possible choice for their child; there are just as many reasons why adoptive parents choose to raise a non-biological child. But the adoptee has the most to gain or lose. In my twenty-six years as a birthmother, I am continually amazed by the infinite variety of paths triad members have traveled, yet we're all connected by the same feelings of uncertainty, wistfulness, and longing for what might have been. Thankfully, adoption today is much more open, kinder, gentler; many studies have documented the impact of adoption on all triad members, and there are fewer black holes than there were a generation or more ago. Catherine McKinley's personal story of life as an adopted Black child raised in a white family and predominately white community will captivate readers. One does not have to a member of the adoption community to appreciate her search for self. Ms. McKinley's prose is a pleasure to read, a beautifully, richly written story of relationships that readers will find hard to put down.

1 comments about A Fly in a Pail of Milk: The Herb Carnegie Story.

1. "Fly in a Pail of Milk" is the autobiography of Herb Carnegie, the 3-time, Senior League MVP and career minor leaguer, who should have broken the NHL color barrier 20 years before Boston Bruin Willie O'Ree. Despite being referred to as "the best that never played," the Ontario native never realized his dream of playing in the NHL for his beloved Toronto Maple Leafs, most said, because of the color of his skin. Though the pacing, at times, is a bit slow, the book is a worthwhile read, primarily because Carnegie is rarely mentioned in hockey history books, and few of even the most versed hockey fans could tell you who he is.