Ebony Bookshelf. - Review - book review

Ebony, April, 2000

THE New Color of Success: 20 Young Black Millionaires Tell You How They're Making It (Prima, $24), a collection of success stories of 20 young, Black entrepreneurs who have turned their ventures into million-dollar enterprises, by Niki Butler Mitchell. The book introduces innovators--such as the four founders of FUBU clothing company, producer Yvette Lee Bowser and helicopter pilot/flight school instructor Robin Petgrave--who share their histories and strategies for realizing their dreams. The book brings the stories of these trailblazers from the fringes to the center and offers them as models of economic prosperity.

Black Girl in Paris (Riverhead, $23.95) details the fictional journey of a young Black woman writer who abandons America for Paris, following the trail of famous African-American artists who once traveled to the City of Lights in search of their voice and freedom, by Shay Youngblood. The novel shadows the main characer, Eden, as she finds her way by working unheralded jobs and occasionally stealing, combing Parisian streets looking for inspiration and her muse, James Baldwin, believed to be somewhere in the city. During her spiritual quest, the young woman manages to find love, make new revelations about the city and Black Americans and learn humility. Youngblood's book is an interesting melange--part coming-of-age memoir, part history, part advice guide for Black artists who dream of exploring the French capital--that is well worth reading.

Bud, Not Buddy (Delacorte, $15.95) is a Newberry- and Coretta Scott King-award-winning children's book that follows a runaway boy on his quest to find the jazz-band leader he thinks is his father, by Christopher Paul Curtis. The tale, set in Depression-era Michigan, recreates the historic atmosphere of that time as Bud passes different scenes and characters on his journey from a bad foster home to reclaim his dad. It's a touching story that educates as it entertains, an impressive blend of history and narrative.

Scream in Silence (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95), a Marti MacAlister mystery, by Eleanor Taylor Bland. The book, the eighth in her series, follows MacAlister, a middle-aged woman cop who struggles to balance a new family while working with her partner to solve the mystery of a rash of arsons that gets progressively more deadly. It's a compelling read that holds interest until the end.

Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), an assemblage of interviews, essays, historical documents and testimonies that create a 300-year landscape of Black America's drive for social justice, edited by Manning Marable and Leith Mullings. The anthology travels from slavery and Reconstruction to the present, a voyage punctuated by historic words of African-American luminaries such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King Jr., contemporary voices such as Cornel West, Amiri Baraka and Angela Davis, and the experiences of everyday Black men and women.

I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. (The Free Press, $25) is a book that challenges popular notions of King's leadership, by Michael Eric Dyson. The author redefines the icon as a flesh-and-blood man whose message evolved to fit the times.

Black Hands, White Saris: The Story of African-American Whalers (Scholastic, $15.95), a historical narrative for young adults about the role African-Americans played in the whaling industry, by Patricia C. McKissack & Fredrick L. McKissack. From runaway slaves to free Black sailors to prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Black whalers helped create an industry that supplied 80 percent of the country's oil. It is a compelling and detailed story about another little-known contribution by African-Americans to the development of the nation.

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, $26), a three-way mirror into the American slave market as seen by the enslaved, the slaveholder and the purchaser, by Walter Johnson. The book brings the horrors of antebellum America to life as it reveals how the traders ripped apart Black families--selling husband from wife, mother and father from child and tried to dehumanize the people caught in the system. It also shows another little-known side of the slave trade where enslaved Africans continually searched for ways to escape sale and sometimes succeeded, whether by escape or by resistance. The author blends slave narratives, letters and records to present a detailed account of a previously invisible chapter in that "peculiar institution."

Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper's Daughter (Hyperion Books for Children, $15.99), a patchwork of remembrances that color the life of a 91-year-old Texas woman, collected and edited by Alan Govenar and illustrated by Shane W. Evans. As moving as the images that celebrate her story, her words paint a history that include slavery, the blues, equal rights, family values and African-American holidays and traditions. The book, with its simple eloquence and stirring pictures, gives us a glimpse into one woman's life that holds lessons for us all.