BOOKS IN BRIEF

Crisis, The, Jan/Feb 2005

Dr King's Refrigerator: And Other Bedtime Stories by Charles Johnson (Scribner, $20). This collection of clever stories populated by colorful characters explores race issues and life matters. In the title story, a young Martin Luther King Jr. has an epiphany during a late-night refrigerator raid.

The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executives by Sister Helen Prejean (Random House, $25.95). The Roman Catholic nun from Louisiana who authored Dead Man Walking, here writes about two men she has accompanied to execution whom she believes were innocent.

Growing Up in Slavery: Stories of Young Slaves as Told by Themselves edited by Yuval Taylor (Lawrence Hill Books, $22.95). The harrowing, and sometimes triumphant, experiences of 10 slaves younger than the age of 19, including Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown and Harriet Jacobs, among others, are collected here.

We Are All the Same: A Story of a Boy's Courage and a Mother's Love by Jim Wooten (The Penguin Press, $19.95). South African Nkosi Johnson died of AIDS at age 12. His story is told here by an American correspondent who was awed by the brave, precocious boy who became known throughout his country and the world for his AIDS awareness efforts and message that the life of every child has value.

Cotton Field of Dreams; A Memoir by Janis F. Kearney (Writing Our World Press - Chicago, $22.95). The author recounts her American story: One of 19 Black children growing up in pre-civil rights Arkansas who often missed school during cotton harvest, she went on to publish a Black newspaper and serve in the White House as President Clinton's personal diarist.

Creating Thier Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists by Lisa E. Farrington (Oxford University Press, $55). Interviews and images enhance this comprehensive coffee-table account of individual Black women artists, and the movements within which they have created, from slavery to today.