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racism

“That Kind of Mother” Takes on the Challenges of Race and Motherhood

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Rebecca Stone desperately needs help with her newborn and Priscilla, a La Leche nurse from the hospital comes to her rescue. Having experience being a mother herself when she was a single, teen mother many years ago, Priscilla leaves her job at the hospital to become the nanny for Rebecca’s baby. Rebecca feels extremely close to Priscilla, confiding her fears, the hopes and dreams she had for herself and has for her child. She looks at Priscilla as a source of stability in her life, all while learning how to care for a child, and just what it means to be a mother.  Priscilla ends up changing the way that Rebecca looks on not only motherhood, but also the world…

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Early Bird Books: E.R. Braithwaite Wrangles Unruly High School Students in To Sir, With Love

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By treating his students as equals, a schoolteacher creates a unique bond with his class. As a black man in the 1950s, a time during which racism was rampant, the odds were against E.R. Braithwaite. Few people expected him to succeed as an engineer, much less as a high school teacher in London’s East End. His all-white students were disrespectful at best, and delinquent at worst—an impossible gaggle of undereducated, hormonal teenagers who had no respect for his authority. And yet, despite these bumpy beginnings, Braithwaite was able to turn things around by using a simple but unusual tactic: He would treat his students as adults. Braithwaite wrote of his experiences in his autobiographical novel, To Sir, With Love, in 1959. Eight…

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Award-Winning Novelist Alexis Wright Talks to BookTrib About Her Latest Work, ‘The Swan Book’

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When you find a book that is compelling, poignant and just really good, you want to tell everyone you meet about it and have the same experience that you did while reading it. The Swan Book, by acclaimed novelist, Alexis Wright, is one of those books that I could not wait to tell BookTrib’s readers about. There has not been, perhaps, a better or more important time than now to read this book and receive its message. In The Swan Book, a young girl named Oblivia Ethelyne, the victim of a brutal assault by several boys, is found hiding in a gum tree by Bella Donna of the Champions, a refugee of the climate change wars. Bella Donna takes Oblivia to live…

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Strength of a Man: Author Steve Berry Talks about the Life and Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Today, we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Later this year, we will be marking the 50th anniversary of his assassination.  Bestselling author Steve Berry has a forthcoming book, The Bishop’s Pawn, a historical novel that looks at the assassination of Martin Luther King in a whole new light and begs the question of why the civil rights icon was assassinated.  To commemorate King Day and learn a little more about what Berry has in store for us in his new novel, we spoke with the author whose insight and understanding pointed to the one thing that is important to remember on this day: the strength and endurance of a man. BookTrib: Your novel focuses…

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‘The Last Suppers’ by Mandy Mikulencak Weaves a Complicated Story about Food and Sacrifice

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Set in a 1950s Louisiana penitentiary, The Last Suppers is a captivating novel. Ginny, the young daughter of a murdered prison guard, is now all grown up and cooking for the inmates at the jail.  She meets with the prisoners on death row to find out what they want for their last meal and does her best to create the requested dishes. The drama began two decades prior, when Ginny’s father was killed and his supposed murderer was put to death while she and her mother were present.  Her dad’s best friend, Roscoe, promised to take care of Ginny and her mother; now Ginny and Roscoe, currently the jail warden, work together and are a couple, intimately involved.  Despite the age difference, their…

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Biloxi Blues: School District in Mississippi Bans ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’

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This past weekend, the film Marshall opened in theaters starring Chadwick Boseman. Marshall chronicles one case in the early career of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.  The case, prior to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case Marshall presented before the high court and won, saw him defending a black man (played by Emmy winner and breakout star of ‘This Is Us’, Sterling K. Brown) falsely accused of raping a white woman in Connecticut in 1940. Watching this little-known case in Marshall’s career play out on film, one cannot help but to recall how similar cases of false rape accusations of black men by white women have been portrayed in film (Rosewood comes to mind) and in literature. While rape…

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Race in America: Could You be Prejudiced Without Knowing It?

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Over the rest of this century, judgments about the prominence and impact of race in American society will need to take into account a series of recent critical events. The outright social rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore, the racially motivated massacre in Charleston, and the ever-continuing series of unarmed black men, women, and children being killed by police will continue to have important ramifications. The shocking truth is that these events have occurred while the residents of the White House were an African-American family. Once, undisguised expressions of prejudice and racial antagonism were rife throughout American society, but since the Civil Rights Era, racial vitriol has virtually withered away. Today, only a small minority of Americans endorse any form of…

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I’m Glad I Did: Songwriter Cynthia Weil recreates her early years in the business

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Rules are meant to be broken. Or at least that’s what Grammy-winning songwriter Cynthia Weil proposes in her latest young adult novel, I’m Glad I Did, a book that rides on the back of the Peace Train, giving voice to issues of racism, sexism and war. It was 1961 when Weil first walked down the street toward the Brill Building in the heart of New York City. She could not have known at the time that this was the beginning of one wild career at Aldon Music. Flanked with black marble pillars and a blazing brass edifice, Weil crossed the music building’s threshold and took those first steps into songwriting that would one day lead her to become only the…

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