No comments about Magical heroes: The lives and legends of great African American magicians.

3 comments about Marian Anderson: A SINGER'S JOURNEY (Music in American Life).

1. Allan Keiler's biography of the great African-American contralto Marian Anderson is meticulously researched and detailed. Having exhaustively consulted contemporary sources neglected by other researchers, such as black newspapers, and personally interviewed many people, including the singer herself, Keiler sheds new light on the familiar story of Anderson's life and career.

   Of particular interest is his detailed chronology of the famous events of 1939 that began with the refusal of the Daughters of the American Revolution to allow Anderson to give a concert in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., and ended with her outdoor concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a performance that propelled the singer to iconic status in the civil rights movement. His recounting of this and subsequent events, including her eventual success in obtaining a performance in Constitution Hall years later, reveals Anderson to have been surprisingly hesitant and passive in combatting segregation, and by no means unequivocally in favor of some of the bolder, more confrontational moves of her supporters.

   Likewise, Keiler probes her personal relationships, something Anderson was reticent about in her own autobiography, and reveals a human being with faults and frailties, one who could be dictatorial and impatient toward members of her family, and aloof and uncommunicative when terminating relationships with lovers and artistic collaborators (notably Billy King, her first regular accompanist, who never recovered from the pain of being replaced by Kosti Vehanen). In no way do these revelations detract from Anderson's accomplishments as a musician; rather, they form a touching picture of the real sacrifices she had to make in the service of her talent.

   The one major area in which this book falls short is a detailed examination of Anderson's vocal art. Despite her unique status in American history, the singer comes from and joins several well-defined artistic traditions--the low-voiced female classical singer, a vocal species now almost extinct; the singer who makes a career through concert and oratorio work rather than opera; and the African-American classical singer. With her well-documented performance history and large recorded legacy, the time is ripe for a definitive study of Anderson the vocal artist, writing of the kind John Ardoin and Michael Scott have published about Maria Callas and her work. Despite its many virtues this volume does not pretend to, nor does it accomplish this task.




2. In 1939 world-class contralto Marian Anderson was barred -- because of her race -- from performing an Easter concert in Washington's Constitution Hall when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to rent her the space.

   Instead, supported by the NAACP and Eleanor Roosevelt, Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial. In so doing she brought attention to both her magnificent voice and the reality of segregation in the capital.

   This absorbing authorized biography puts Anderson's career before her skin color, but Brandeis University music professor Keiler, who interviewed the singer shortly before her death in 1993 at age 96, carefully documents both her musical evolution and civic triumphs.

   Though clearly awed by the stately vocalist who dressed in white satin, Keiler celebrates the humanitarian who served as a U.N. delegate, funded scholarships for black youth (both Jessye Norman and Leontyne Price auditioned for one but lost), mastered works by Brahms, Schubert and Sibelius and became the first African-American to sing at the Metropolitan Opera.

   An important read of a voice which sang so true.




3. Though Mr. Keiler does a tremendous job of putting Ms. Anderson's life on paper, at the end I still felt I did not know her. I don't know if it was because he had the cooperation of her family and was overly cautious, or if she is just a personality to complicated to really get to know. Anyway, a great read, but just left me wanting to know more.

2 comments about American Hunger.

1. American hunger published in 1944 by Harper & Row is the sequel to Black Boy.
   
   Richard Wright( R W ) leaves the South to move to Chicago and later on to New-York city ; it is the period of 1927 to 1937, the period of a young adult , 19 years old to 29 years old.
   
   Within 6 chapters and and Afterword by the French specialist Michel Fabre ( about 146 pages ), RW tells us about his efforts to become a writer. We learn that he reads a lot ( 5 hours a day ) books by solid writers like Proust( Remembrances), the American Mercury review in its best years, Gertrude Stein( Three Lives), Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), Dostoevski ( Possessed).
   
   He also begins to practice his writing , working in a cafe or at the post office but spending the rest of his time on practising the craft of writing.
   
   It is also an opportunity for him to read sociology and psychology books and develop his critique of American materialistic society.
   
   An inspiring text for today college students and junior writers. Strongly recommended.



2. I read this book a few years ago after I found out it was the sequel to Black Boy, a book which made a great impression on me. The same superb prose and insight into the human condition I found in Black Boy continued in American Hunger. I'm a black man. One of the things I hate about this present time is that we black folk have become too used to thinking of ourselves in terms of a color. It's as if we are people attached to a color, not human beings who just happen to be black. Unfortunately I think we are perpetuating this problem ourselves more than anyone is foisting it on us. The thing I most admire about the writings of men like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison was their portrayal of the black person as just that - a person. A human being dealing with a dilemma. And since all human beings deal with dilemmas that puts us all in the same boat no matter what our racial background. In American Hunger, Richard Wright shows how a black human being coped with a fundament! al problem - being seen as less than but knowing he was more. And he did it in such a way that any human being can identify with him and learn from his experience. This sort of writing is much needed today when it is assumed that a "black" problem can only be understood by black people, thereby putting them on some alien and unreachable level. Wright shows that we are part of the human family, very understandable and "just plain folks" when you get down to it.

1 comments about Black Sailors: Afro-American Merchant Seamen and Whalemen Prior to the Civil War (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies).

1. Putney has put together an impressive amount of factual data on this subject. Her research is comprehensive and well annotated. The extent of her sources provides for a compelling and credible read. A fascinating subject particularly for those pursuing African American studies. She has taken a rather obscure topic in the scholarly annals and given it well-researched attention.

1 comments about My Quilts and Me: The Diary of an American Quilter.

1. I enjoyed this book - it was like spending an afternoon with Nora Ezell. I was fascinated by the way the book reads like a diary. One can see how Ms. Ezell felt when working for HOURS and HOURS on a particular block of a quilt. As a quilter, I was interested to see how another quilter goes through the creative process. The quilts themselves are shown beautifully in this book - all in color! For those of us who don't follow patterns when quilting - this book is such an encouragement!

5 comments about Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920.

1. I first learned of the Healy family in January 1959, when I paged through the new 12 month Catholic calendar. Each month was devoted to a 19th century Catholic who made a significant contribution to American Catholic life. One of the individuals was James Augustine Healy. The short description said that James Healy was the first American negro (the acceptable for Blacks or African Americans in 1959) to be ordained a priest; and that he later became Bishop of Portland Maine (certainly another first), where he provided distinguished leadership in pastoral work, education, social advocacy, and public welfare. The commentary went on to report that James was born in Georgia to an Irish-born white father and a black slave woman. Nothing was mentioned of any siblings, the names of his parents, or how he got from Georgia to Maine.
   
   My immediate reaction was a mild (to myself) comment, "Isn't that interesting."
   
   Over the years I learned more bits and pieces about the famous Irish-American Healy family --- and what a family! . I learned that two other Healy brothers were prominent American priests --- the Jesuit, Patrick Francis Healy, being the one time president of Georgetown University; and Alexander Sherwood Healy, a canon law expert in the diocese of Boston. From James Michner's Alaska, I learned that that another Healy sibling, Michael Healy, was a famous captain of the BEAR, a US Coast Guard in vessel operating in the Alaskan waters. And later still I learned that two Healy sisters became nuns with one of them attaining the rank of mother Superior in her community.
   
   But then I learned so much more from Passing for White: Race, Religion, and The Healy Family, 1820-1920 by James M. O'Toole.
   
   Indeed the founder of this family was Michael Morris Healy, born in Ireland (Galway or Roscommon) in 1796. Sometime in the early 1800s he acquired land near present day Macon Georgia, and became a cotton plantation owner. And yes he acquired slaves to work the plantation, including one Eliza Clark.
   
   Unlike other slave owners, Michael did not have a wife in the big house and a concubine in the slave quarters. Laws during the slavery era prohibited interracial marriages, but Michael and Eliza carried out their family life as husband and wife until their death in 1850 (Eliza's death preceded Michael's by about three months.) Their union produced nine children who survived to adulthood. (One died in infancy)
   
   The Healy children were never treated as slaves, but under contemporary Georgia law, they were indeed slaves. Why? A person's slave-status was determined from the status of the mother. Knowing this, Michael Healy began to send children North for their schooling. James was first to move North, followed by brothers Sherwood, Patrick, Hugh (another brother), Michael, and sister Martha Ann. Later, after the death of the parents in 1870 the younger children Amanda Josephine, Eliza Dunamore, and Eugene moved North -- with Hugh's able assistance.
   
   All this was happening when the Fugitive Slave Act was the law of the land. Technically all the Healys were runaway slaves subject to apprehension and the law's subsequent Draconian consequences.
   
   Hugh was the only one of the Healy siblings to ever return to Georgia. By returning in 1851 to retrieve three youngest siblings he placed himself at great personal risk. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, a Black person living north of the Maxon Dixon line was at great personal risk. But the risk of a Black person, technically a runaway, returning to Macon Georgia!
   
   O'Toole goes on to chronicle the many achievements and to a lesser extent the disappointments of the Healy clan. I won't list them in this review. Read them for yourself. But the title, PASSING FOR WHITE give us a hint of the Healys's lives in 19th century Catholic America. According to O'Toole the Healys did not deny or hide their black origin, many know of it. But the Healys managed to redefine themselves Irish-Catholic Americans.
   
   But that's enough from me. O'Toole's Passing for White .. Is a fascinating, well written, and well-researched (34 pages of end notes and a 17 page Bibliography) work. I don't want to give away the entire book's content. Learn for yourself about this distinguished Irish-American and African-American family.
   
   Ed Murphy
   FALLS CHURCH VA



2. I'm somewhat biased from having studied under Dr O'Toole who is a friendly and generous scholar. That said this book is a good microhistory of one families experience at "passing". There's a fairly deft handling here of identity politics as the Healy sibling redefined themselves from being Black to being Catholic and white. There is an assumption that the siblings Black heritage should be just as important as their Irish heritage, and at times the book is a little sad as many of the Healy siblings very forcefully turn their back on their former Black identity. The book is fascinating both as the reconstruction of a 19th century family (which is the direction from which I approached it) and as an examination of the fluid nature of identity in America.



3. Michael Morris Healy, an Irish immigrant, arrives in the United States around 1815 and establishes a plantation near Macon, Georgia. Healy and his mulatto common-law wife, Eliza Clark Healy, have 10 children. All of the children are sent North to be educated, baptized as Catholics, and leave any social disabilities of Georgia behind them. The children achieve great success as Irish-Americans:
   
   James Augustine Healy became Bishop of Portland, Maine
   
   Patrick Francis Healy became the rector then President of Georgetown University (1873-1881).
   
   Michael Morris Healy, Jr. joined the United States Revenue Cutter Service, becoming a celebrated sea captain, the sole representative of the U.S. government in the vast reaches of Alaska.
   
   Alexander Sherwood Healy also became a priest, director of the seminary in Troy, New York and rector of the Cathedral in Boston
   
   Three sisters became nuns, one a Mother Superior.
   
   It must be emphasized that the Healy offspring were accepted as Irish American and "white" (whatever that means). The positions they obtained could not have been theirs if they had been black or even dark-skinned. Many other "white" people who knew about the Healys' mixed-race origins accepted them as Irish-Americans. Are the Healys therefore entitled to be counted among the ranks of Irish-Americans and included in Irish-American history? YES! The family was IRISH-AMERICAN, not "African American." There was nothing "African" about them.
   
   The Healy family's achievements do not show what "blacks" could do in the 19th century because they were NOT BLACK.
   
   O'Toole's racist devotion to the "one drop" myth blinds him to racial reality in the 19th century. He assumes that the "one drop" myth was law and universally accepted by "whites." It wasn't. Any research into racial classification laws in the 19th century would have shown him that various degrees of "negro blood" were accepted into the "white race," even in the Deep South. Also, the combination of a person's looks and the reputation he had established were all taken into consideration in determining whether one was "white" or not. It is obvious that the Healy family siblings succeeded in establishing themselves as second-generation Irish Americans. O'Toole cannot bear this and insists that the Healy siblings were really "African Americans." He also calls their mother, Eliza, an "African American" even though her ancestry was at least half European.
   
   O'Toole assumes that all "whites" believed in "mulatto inferiority" or the doctrine that mixed-race people are biologically inferior to BOTH or ALL "pure" parental groups. He is too ignorant to understand that this doctrine was created as a defense of slavery by pro-slavery intellectuals who wanted to counter the Northern anti-slavery argument that, if slavery is justified on the basis of "race," then "white" slaves should be automatically free because the negro racial "taint" had been effectively bred out of the line. Lawrence Tenzer explains the origins of this doctrine very well in his book The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue. O'Toole would do well to sit at Tenzer's feet and learn something. O'Toole follows the usual liberal excuse of claiming that "society" defined the Healy family as "black," but expresses wonderment at the fact that "whites" who knew about the Healys' mixed ancestry still treated them as "white." O'Toole is amazed that establishing a "white" identity was so easy for the Healys. Could it be because they WERE white, despite their "drop" of "black blood"?
   
   Captain Healy married Mary Ann Roach, herself the daughter of Irish immigrants. One of the sisters who married and produced a large family also married a fellow Irish-American. The Healys were practicing endogamy, not "interracial" marriage:
   
   Captain Michael Healy repeatedly referred to white settlers [in Alaska] as "our people.". His teenage son Fred, who accompanied his father on a voyage in 1883, scratched his name into a rock on a remote island above the Arctic Circle, proudly telling his diary that he was the first "white boy" to do so.
   
   The Healy family saga belongs with the history of IRISH-AMERICANS.Passing for Who You Really Are



4. The large, extremely intelligent, and admirable Healy family is treated badly by an author who doubts the sincerity of vocations and religion in general. Far from "passing for white," the Healy brothers suffered double persecution; by birth they were despised as both Irish and African, and by religion they were despised as Catholic in a virulantly anti-Catholic America. They were illegitimate according to American laws, though they were legitimate in a Europe that accepted the interracial marriage of their parents. Patrick Healy became a Jesuit not to "pass for white," but out of love. He became President of Georgetown University. James and Sherwood Healy became secular priests, and James died Bishop of Portland, Maine. This author is as narrow-minded as 19th c. "Know Nothing" Nativists in his attitude towards truly good people.



5. This book opened my eyes to what's been going on even in the 21st century in this country. I've been experiencing something of a struggle like that family's my entire life, but it took reading about it during that particular period in history to understand where today's societal attitudes are coming from. Nothing has changed. Blacks still treat you like you're trying to "pass for white" just by becoming a nun or a monk. And that explains all the racial problems, tensions, and attempted violence that goes with it; black society's resistance to the religious orders has taken even more of a nasty turn in the last century than in the one before it.

2 comments about Malcolm X: Make It Plain.

1. I can't seem to find an address to which this information should be directed, so here it is: This title should be listed as 'Text by William Strickland, Oral Histories selected and edited by Cheryll Y. Greene' (that's me). That's the way the credits are listed on the front cover, title page, with the Library of Congress, etc. Please correct your search function to include this information. Sometimes people still look for the book using my name. Thank you. (I had to fill in the star rating above in order to send this to you. Please disregard.)



2. Based on the acclaimed PBS documentary, this photographic biography of the controversial African American leader combines evocative photographs with poignant memories from friends, family members, admirers and a few critics. This multifaceted examination of the militant leader's turbulent life helped me understand his rage and power. If you read his autobiography, then you will find this book especially valuable. An excellent supplement to the documentary because it includes material that they had to exclude, due to time limitations, from the documentary.

1 comments about American Saturday.

1. Clark Howard's true crime writings are written in a way that makes you feel you are right there. I first read Clark Howard's ZEBRA about the killings that took place in San Francisco and could not put the book down, in fact I stayed up to three AM and still didn't want to put the book down.
   
   Shortly after reading ZEBRA I became a correctional officer at San Quentin Prison. I saw and got to know two of the convicted people mentioned, Larry Green and J.C. Simon. In fact, Clark Howard described them so well that I recognized Larry Green coming back from a visit to North Block without knowing who he was. I was able to talk to these two and could not get over how accurately they were portrayed in the book. He had their description, manner and personality nailed down.
   
   I read AMERICAN SATURDAY while working at San Quentin. I worked for a time in the AC or Adjustment Center that is the center of this books story. Again, Clark Howard's description was so accurate to the detail of how the AC is. I talked to a few of the "Old Timer Correctional Officers" and they gave the very same account and details of the book. It was chilling to actually be there knowing what had happened, including the bullet holes still left in the wall after the CO's took back the AC.
   
   Clark Howard is a master true crime writer who does exact research and has a captivating style in his writing. AMERICAN SATURDAY is another one of his books that you just can't put down.
   
   I highly recommend this book.

1 comments about Malcolm X As Cultural Hero and Other Afrocentric Essays: And Other Afrocentric Essays.

1. Of all Asante's work, this book (compiled in 1993 during the height of Afrocentricity's platform and Malcolm X mania) stands out as one of the more accessible and endearing tomes of his oeuvre. Despite the eye-catching title (for its time), we are treated to some excellent essays on a variety of subjects, which is a refreshing departure from much of the metathoery of his other work. One of the things that people charge Afrocentrists with is not fashioning practical positions on contemporary issues, and justifiably so in many cases. Asante deals with genocide in Africa, Malcolm X, gender and television with aplomb, heart and a solid voice.

   A must for Asante fans, and a greta book for essayists, debators and peopel who love challenging, original thought.

1 comments about Forced to Grow (Interlink World Fiction).

1. The author tells her story, which has had a lot of strife in her native land. She is a black woman in South Africa, during the unrest, and aparthid. The story does tell how she helped the black movement in South Africa.
   
   The story also tells of a woman who leaves the raising of her children to her mother and her neighbors. She works, which is what many women do all over the world, however, she also leaves her children in the poverty and descrimination to take several trips out of her country, eventually getting a Master's degee in the US. We don't hear the story of the children, who are left in a black neighborhood, without electricity or indoor plumbing. We do not hear of the conditions they live in. We do hear of her going to school, of going to developed countries to continue her education, while her children are left behind, with no schooling, as the schools were not able to keep going during the unrest.
   
   Yes, she did work for what she got, but while she was being flown around the world to conferences, most of the people of her country were living on much less per year than her air fare.
   
   To me, it was a very selfish book, one where the author showed how she put herself before all else. It was a great dissapointment, while she worked to get her education, and get jobs, it seemed that after that, she left the past, including her family behind her. I was hoping for more of how changes were made in the country, if changes helped the people of the country, if the children who were not educated were ever educated and able to obtain positions above an existance, or if yet another generation was left with the ravages of the war, with not much to show for it.