BOOKSHELF. - Review - book review

Ebony, August, 2001

SOMETIMES overlooked in all the recent excitement generated by the boon in books by African-Americans is the fact that many of these new titles are of the self-help and inspirational variety. Not too long ago, there were but a few Black "experts" dispensing advice in book form. Today, those ranks have swelled, with everyone from TV star Della Reese (Touched By An Angel) to businessman and Oprah Winfrey paramour Stedman Graham telling us how to live happier, healthier and more prosperous lives.

The following are some of the recent offerings:

Team-Spirited Parenting: Eight Essential Principles for Parenting Success (John Wiley & Sons, $22.95) is the sixth book by clinical psychologists Darlene Powell Hopson and Derek S. Hopson, who head the Hopson Center for Psychological and Educational Services in Connecticut. In this latest treatise, the Hopsons try to help parents develop communication and coping skills, as well as other techniques, that will enable them to raise happy, secure and respectful children.

Though she's better known as one of the celestial emissaries in the long-running television hit Touched By An Angel, singer and actress Della Reese is also a minister in the Understanding Principles for Better Living Church. As part of her ministerial mission, she has packaged her meditations on love and God into two slim inspirational volumes.

What Is This Thing Called Love? and Strength Is the Energy of God (Hampton Roads Publishing Co., $16.95 each) are filled with soothing nature photographs and the author's reflections on life, love and the meaning of God.

Prime Time: The African American Women's Complete Guide to Midlife Health and Wellness (Ballantine, $25.95) is a resource guide that addresses many of the mental and physical health issues facing African-American women in middle age, including menopause, managing stress and depression, and diffusing anger, by Marilyn Hughes Gaston, a former assistant surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service, and Gayle K. Porter, a clinical psychologist, and principal resource analyst and senior health advisor for the American Institutes for Research.

In his new book, Build Your Own Life Brand! (The Free Press, $25), Stedman Graham, chairman of his own management and marketing consulting firm, tells readers how to build upon their personal strengths and talents, make them widely known, and develop them into a well-defined personal brand that he says will help you achieve your long-term goals.

Walking Proud: Black Men Living Beyond the Stereotypes (Kensington Publishing Corp., $19) explores the complex issue of Black male sexuality and the many ways in which stereotypes about Black men and sex sabotage relationships between Black men and women, and can create barriers that hamper Black men in other areas of their lives, by Dr. George Edmond Smith, a family practice physician and educator.

The Words of Gardner Taylor (Judson Press, $99) is a five-volume set, with companion audio cassettes and compact disks, that includes some of the best-known sermons, lectures and essays of one of America's greatest ministers. Spanning 40 years, the volumes stand as tribute to Taylor's inspirational gifts, and are a model for the way in which the words of a passionate theologian can stir the heart and mind.

African-American Holiday Traditions: Celebrating with Passion, Style and Grace (Kensington Publishing Corp., $22.50) takes the reader on a year-long journey through feasts, parties and extravaganzas, all served up with African-American flair. Lifestyle authority Antoinette Broussard shows how to prepare everything from a Ramadan breakfast to a Carnival bash, offering recipes, home-decorating hints and personal recollections from more than 50 well-known African-American entertainers, writers, public officials and entrepreneurs who share their holiday traditions.

In Soul Food: 52 Principles for Black Entrepreneurial Success (Perseus Publishing, $24), entrepreneur, author and nationally known speaker Robert L. Wallace looks at the barriers and roadblocks that thwart Black business owners and offers strategies for overcoming them.

What It Means to be Daddy: Fatherhood for Black Men Living Away from Their Children (Columbia University Press, $49.50) provides the voices and perspectives of 88 Black fathers who live away from their children. In extensive interviews, author Jennifer E Hamer, an assistant professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, talked to these men about how they perceive their role and responsibilities as a father.

Mom, Are We There Yet? (Dream A Little, Inc., $12.95) is a collection of short stories and humorous ruminations on family and parenthood by newspaper columnist, dentist, wife and mother Monica Anderson.

Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (Beacon Press, $21) is the story of MacArthur "genius" grant-winner and civil rights leader Robert Moses and the birth of "The Algebra Project," a program that brought math literacy to the children of rural Mississippi. In his first book, written with journalist Charles E. Cobb Jr., Moses argues that math literacy is an urgent civil rights issue that must be tackled using the same grass-roots community organizing that helped mobilize sharecroppers and win voting rights over 40 years ago. He says the same strategies must he used to turn around struggling inner-city and rural, poor schools today.