America Books - Page 5

Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It

Juan Williams

Amazon Price: $11.16 List Price: $13.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Three Rivers Press Amazon Marketplace: 68 new & used starting at $3.57

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> By Topic -> Leadership
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 93 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Half a century after brave Americans took to the streets to raise the bar of opportunity for all races, Juan Williams writes that too many black Americans are in crisis—caught in a twisted hip-hop culture, dropping out of school, ending up in jail, having babies when they are not ready to be parents, and falling to the bottom in twenty-first-century global economic competition.

In Enough, Juan Williams issues a lucid, impassioned clarion call to do the right thing now, before we travel so far off the glorious path set by generations of civil rights heroes that there can be no more reaching back to offer a hand and rescue those being left behind.

Inspired by Bill Cosby’s now famous speech at the NAACP gala celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision integrating schools, Williams makes the case that while there is still racism, it is way past time for black Americans to open their eyes to the “culture of failure” that exists within their community. He raises the banner of proud black traditional values—self-help, strong families, and belief in God—that sustained black people through generations of oppression and flowered in the exhilarating promise of the modern civil rights movement. Williams asks what happened to keeping our eyes on the prize by proving the case for equality with black excellence and achievement.

He takes particular aim at prominent black leaders—from Al Sharpton to Jesse Jackson to Marion Barry. Williams exposes the call for reparations as an act of futility, a detour into self-pity; he condemns the “Stop Snitching” campaign as nothing more than a surrender to criminals; and he decries the glorification of materialism, misogyny, and murder as a corruption of a rich black culture, a tragic turn into pornographic excess that is hurting young black minds, especially among the poor.

Reinforcing his incisive observations with solid research and alarming statistical data, Williams offers a concrete plan for overcoming the obstacles that now stand in the way of African Americans’ full participation in the nation’s freedom and prosperity. Certain to be widely discussed and vehemently debated, Enough is a bold, perceptive, solution-based look at African American life, culture, and politics today.


From the Hardcover edition.

The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege

Robert Jensen

Amazon Price: $11.01 List Price: $12.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: City Lights Publishers Amazon Marketplace: 63 new & used starting at $4.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In The Souls of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the question whites wanted to ask him was: "How does it feel to be a problem?" In The Heart of Whiteness, Robert Jensen writes that it is time for white people in America to self-consciously reverse the direction of that question and to fully acknowledge that in the racial arena, they are the problem.

While some whites would like to think that we have reached "the end of racism" in the United States, and others would like to celebrate diversity but are oblivious to the political, economic, and social consequences of a nation-and their sense of self-founded on a system of white supremacy, Jensen proposes a different approach. He sets his sights not only on the racism that can't be hidden, but also on the liberal platitudes that sometimes conceal the depths of that racism in "polite society."

The Heart of Whiteness offers an honest and rigorous exploration of what Jensen refers to as the depraved nature of whiteness in the United States. Mixing personal experience with data and theory, he faces down the difficult realities of -racism and white privilege. He argues that any system that denies non-whites their full humanity also keeps whites from fully accessing their own.

This book is both a cautionary tale for those who believe that they have transcended racism, and also an expression of the hope for genuine transcendence. When white people fully understand and accept the painful reality that they are indeed "the problem," it should lead toward serious attempts to change one's own life and join with others to change society.

Robert Jensen is the author of Citizens of the Empire. He is a professor of media ethics and journalism at The University of Texas at Austin.

Alchemy of Race and Rights

Patricia J. Williams

Amazon Price: $18.45 List Price: $20.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harvard University Press Amazon Marketplace: 85 new & used starting at $0.08

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Ethnic & National -> African-American & Black
Subjects -> Law -> Perspectives on Law -> Jurisprudence
Subjects -> Law -> Procedures & Litigation -> Civil Procedure

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In a personal and profound examination of the United States legal system and its effect on African Americans, Patricia J. Williams uses the term alchemy--the medieval, mysterious practice of turning base metal into gold--as a haunting metaphor for the nearly mystical process by which United States law emboldens and endangers blacks through arcane interpretation, as well as the heroic will of a people to make those laws manifest. "I'm interested in the way in which the legal language flattens and confines in absolutes the complexity of meaning inherent in any given problem," she writes. "I am trying to challenge the usual limits of commercial discourse by using an intentionally double-voiced and relational, rather than a traditionally legal black letter, vocabulary."

With an authorial voice that draws upon Williams's perspective as teacher, lawyer, black American, and woman, The Alchemy of Race and Rights uses a palette of court cases, educational encounters, and personal experiences--including her discovery of her slave ancestor and her interactions with school deans over how to teach law--to create a literary cubist portrait detailing the rhetoric and reality that color the complexion of American justice. --Eugene Holley Jr.

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

Ira Katznelson

Amazon Price: $14.35 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: W. W. Norton Amazon Marketplace: 48 new & used starting at $7.63

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General AAS
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

LBJ was the one who really freed the slaves 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 21 people found this review helpful.

Just finished an outstanding book by Ira Katznelson on the untold history of racial inequality in America. Those who oppose affirmative action should get it and see who has really benefitted from The New Deal, the Fair Deal, Social Security and the GI Bill after WWII. I cannot see how anyone can read this book and not agree with me that Lincoln did not free the slaves. The slaves were not freed until 1964 and LBJ should be credited with that action.

Of course, this information cannot be taught in Florida schools. The education bill has a provision that History must be taught as inerrant gospel. No revisionist thought allowed in Florida schools. They plan to keep the children ignorant of what Southern politicians did from 1864 to 1964.

Editorial Review:

A groundbreaking work that exposes the twisted origins of affirmative action.

In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history."

Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Amazon Price: $25.15 List Price: $27.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Amazon Marketplace: 46 new & used starting at $16.22

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Anthropology -> Cultural
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Discrimination & Racism
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> Race Relations -> America

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

If open to understanding the minority perspective 5 out of 5 stars.
33 of 40 people found this review helpful.

This book may annoy, irritate, and even infuriate some, but if any of these emotions arise, you might ask yourself "why do I feel so defensive?"...and I promise, you will gather a bit of enlightment. The book portrays the perspective of minority peoples in a way that will open your eyes. It IS one-sided, but not because the author is a "racist", rather, he feels (it's in his Author's Note) that enough books are written ABOUT minorities from a "white perspective" view of the world, so he thought he would write a book that showed a distinct minority perspective on "white" culture. It is not meant to arise aggression, it is written to give realizations and enhance communications between the races.

Editorial Review:

In this book, Bonilla-Silva explores with systematic interview data the nature and components of post-civil rights racial ideology. Specifically, he documents the existence of a new suave and apparently non-racial racial ideology he labels color-blind racism. He suggests this ideology, anchored on the decontextualized, ahistorical, and abstract extension of liberalism to racial matters, has become the organizational matrix whites use to explain and account for racial matters in America.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Thomas Sowell

Amazon Price: $12.21 List Price: $17.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Encounter Books Amazon Marketplace: 55 new & used starting at $4.38

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Discrimination & Racism
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> Race Relations -> America
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> Race Relations -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Good Read 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I was automatically attracted to this book by the title and was interested to see what was written. I'm not a big fan of Sowell but this was a very compelling read. Finally a book that explains "ghetto" culture and not just fingerpoints at it. Also, I love this book because it equates whites and blacks that live similar cultures. Too many conservative writings that focus on societal failures always point to the black community when the same ills exist in predominatly white locales.

I think this is a book that both whites and blacks should read.

Editorial Review:

This book presents the kind of eye-opening insights into the history and culture of race for which Sowell has become famous. As late as the 1940s and 1950s, he argues, poor Southern rednecks were regarded by Northern employers and law enforcement officials as lazy, lawless, and sexually immoral. This pattern was repeated by blacks with whom they shared a subculture in the South. Over the last half century poor whites and most blacks have moved up in class and affluence, but the ghetto remains filled with black rednecks. Their attempt to escape, Sowell shows, is hampered by their white liberal friends who turn dysfunctional black redneck culture into a sacrosanct symbol of racial identity. In addition to Black Rednecks and White Liberals, the book takes on subjects ranging from Are Jews Generic? to The Real History of Slavery.

Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice

Paul Kivel

Amazon Price: $13.84 List Price: $18.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: New Society Publishers Amazon Marketplace: 77 new & used starting at $5.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Education -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Education -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

A New Edition--Great! 5 out of 5 stars.
37 of 43 people found this review helpful.

When I began reading the previous edition a few years ago, I realized that I wanted to discuss it with other white people as I worked through the exercises.

As a result five women in leadership roles in their church congregations discussed this book over lunches over some months. It took as many lunches as there are chapters. We learned much about ourselves as white women and much about the history of racism in the United States.

I continue to look for ways to share the impact of this book with others. I am pleased that there is a new edition and look forward to seeing what has made this very useful book even better.

Editorial Review:

Continuously at the top of New Society Publishers' best-seller list for five years, Uprooting Racism has been revised and expanded with more tools than ever to help white people understand and stand-up to racism. In addition to updating existing chapters, the new edition explores how entrenched racism has been revealed in the new economy, voting, anti-Arab prejudice, and health care policy.

God and Race in American Politics: A Short History

Mark A. Noll

Amazon Price: $15.61 List Price: $22.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Princeton University Press Amazon Marketplace: 49 new & used starting at $9.70

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General AAS
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Religion has been a powerful political force throughout American history. When race enters the mix the results have been some of our greatest triumphs as a nation--and some of our most shameful failures. In this important book, Mark Noll, one of the most influential historians of American religion writing today, traces the explosive political effects of the religious intermingling with race.

Noll demonstrates how supporters and opponents of slavery and segregation drew equally on the Bible to justify the morality of their positions. He shows how a common evangelical heritage supported Jim Crow discrimination and contributed powerfully to the black theology of liberation preached by Martin Luther King Jr. In probing such connections, Noll takes readers from the 1830 slave revolt of Nat Turner through Reconstruction and the long Jim Crow era, from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to "values" voting in recent presidential elections. He argues that the greatest transformations in American political history, from the Civil War through the civil rights revolution and beyond, constitute an interconnected narrative in which opposing appeals to Biblical truth gave rise to often-contradictory religious and moral complexities. And he shows how this heritage remains alive today in controversies surrounding stem-cell research and abortion as well as civil rights reform.

God and Race in American Politics is a panoramic history that reveals the profound role of religion in American political history and in American discourse on race and social justice.

Ethnic America: A History

Thomas Sowell

Amazon Price: $20.90 List Price: $22.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Basic Books Amazon Marketplace: 72 new & used starting at $3.29

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General AAS
Subjects -> History -> Historical Study -> Social History

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Out of date but still excellent 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Published more than twenty-five years ago, this book is beginning to show its age. Some of its terminology is distracting. It uses "native American" to refer to descendants of early Anglo-Saxon settlers, rather than indigenous Americans, for example, and it distinguishes between "Celtic Irish" and "Scotch-Irish" (who were also Celtic). Except for the Scotch-Irish, it ignores Americans of Scottish origin, many of whom came directly to America without passing through Ireland. Its treatment of Asian Americans omits the Vietnamese. Of greater concern is that it ignores the descendants of the indigenous tribes that originally settled the continent and who form a significant part of our population and our cultural amalgam. Also a problem is the age of its data. This is especially problematic in the case of Latin American immigrants, whose numbers and circumstances have changed appreciably in the last two decades.
Despite my reservations, however, I found Sowell's book a valuable source of insight. It considers each group studied with an admirable combination of compassion and objectivity. It is packed with information that enriched my understanding--and appreciation--of our nation's ethnic heritage. Although I wish for an undated and expanded edition, this remains an excellent book.

Editorial Review:

This classic work by the distinguished economist traces the history of nine American ethnic groups—the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Chinese, African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans.

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Vintage)

Gene Roberts, Hank Klibanoff

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Vintage Amazon Marketplace: 64 new & used starting at $4.94

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> 1945 - Present
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> African Americans -> History

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Free at Last, Free At Last, Thank God Almighty (almost) Free at Last 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful.

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

-- Reviewed by Philip W. Henry
When the civil rights story began in the early 1960's, I was a freshman at a Northern College. So much was happening between 1963 and 1968 that it was possible to miss some of the real history unfolding outside "The Ivory Tower `while studying the past. Now, I'm trying to fill in some of the blanks in my education. "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of the Nation" is a good place to begin. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff were both intimately involved in covering the biggest stories of the South. Drawing on extensive interviews, and digging in previously unpublished documents and memoirs, they paint a fascinating portrait of the crisis of conscience and confidence that the civil rights story caused in the Southern Media Establishment.
The tensions developed in covering the race story were not just between White, Liberal, and often Jewish Northern News Organizations v. the Old South; but within the Southern Media as well. There were honest and decent Southern publishers and editors who decried the move toward Klan violence and barricaded school houses epitomized by Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus and George Wallace. Ironically, many of the top editors of the supposed Yankee Press (especially The New York Times) were Southerners themselves. (Turner Catledge, one of the T imes's top editors, was from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the three civil rights workers were found murdered).
If anything propelled the Story of the South into the living rooms of the country it was TV News. The sight of Freedom Riders being beaten, firehosed and dragged away; and the four little girls in their church outfits killed in the cowardly KKK bombing of a Birmingham Church, inflamed the American conscience.

The Assassinations of Medgar Evers; the Birmingham Four; and the three young civil rights workers from the north and the refusal of local law enforcement to investigate the case added to the fray. The sheriff and his deputy were later indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in a case prosecuted by John Doar, the young Justice Department Lawyer who later gained fame in the Watergate Prosecution.

In one telling scene, Doar stands in front of a group of rebel yokels and confronts them. He could easily have been killed or lynched, but by the force of his conviction he prevailed. .

If there is some vindication out of all this, several cases believed to be so cold or so compromised that justice could never be served, have been solved. Medgar Evers's killing took thirty years to solve, but the failed fertilizer salesman Byron De La Beckwith, who was spared by a hung jury earlier, paid a price thirty years later: (One Mississippi paper, unable to bring itself to claim De La Beckwith as one of "Ole Miss's Own," said: " Californian held in Murders." (He had spent his first five years in California)
"In 1994, thirty years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence concerning statements he made to others. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly good state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was finally convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after living as a free man for three decades after the killing. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January 2001."

There are good guys and gremlins, of course. Robert Kennedy, never popular in the south, is portrayed as the loyal Attorney General to his brother, who never seemed to totally grasp the dimensions of the story. Justice Department Lawyer John Doar is a giant figure in the post-freedom riders killing trials. Moderate southern editors and publishers like Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and Hodding Carter of Greenville, Miss, where the three student volunteers were found murdered, kept their composure and focus despite financial and social pressure from conservatives. (Carter, in particular, began as a staunch segregationist but became more liberal).
"The Race Beat" is a valuable addition to the literature of Journalism and race relations in the United States.

Editorial Review:

An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s.

Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.