by Michael Janairo

Black History Month: “The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano”

In recognition of Black History Month, the Books Blog will highlight important books, plays, poems and contributors to the African-American literary tradition. Of course, a month isn’t long enough, and there is no reason why this will end with this month. But it is a good excuse to highlight important works that help define not only the African-American experience, but what it means to be an American.

Is there a book, play or essay you think is a vital part of the African-American literary tradition, especially something that has touched you personally? E-mail your idea to me at mjanairo@timesunion.com.

The first book the Books Blog will highlight is also one of the earliest:

equiano150pxw.jpg“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789),” (Bedford edition). I was introduced to this book in graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh in a class on slave narratives with professor Ronald Judy.
The book is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, first-person slave narratives written by a former slave. The book recounts a life that began in freedom in 1745 in what is now Nigeria and then his being taken captive and sold into slavery as an 11-year-old boy (first in Africa and then through the Middle Passage to Barbados and, eventually, Virginia), being purchased by an Englishman and traveling to Britain, and earning money to buy his freedom.
“The Narrative” was a best-seller in England and later America. As an anti-slavery text, it gave graphic accounts that helped to shore up abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. After writing the book, Equiano traveled extensively to promote it and its ideas. He married an English woman. He died in 1797.
The book is of vital importance for an understanding of the complexities and cruelties of the slave trade.
The introduction to the Equiano section in the “Norton Anthology of African American Literature” says:

Equiano’s Life bequeaths to modern African American literature a prescient and provacative example of what W.E.B. Du Bois would call “double-consciousness” — the African American’s fateful sense of “twoness” born of a bicultural identification with both an African heritage and a European education.

Click “more” for a passage from Equiano’s “Narrative” and for links.

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by Michael Janairo

Events on Thursday, Feb. 1

cheever_susan.jpgFrom the New York State Writers Institute Calendar:

February 1 (Thursday): Fiction and nonfiction writer Susan Cheever
Seminar – 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Reading – 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

Susan Cheever, novelist, nonfiction writer, and “Newsday” columnist, is the bestselling author of four extraordinary memoirs, including “Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker” (1999), and “Home Before Dark” (1984), a portrait of her father, writer John Cheever.

Her most recent book is “American Bloomsbury” (2007), a study of the intertwined lives and love affairs of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau.

For an interview with the author written by Donna Liquori, click more.

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by Michael Janairo

An amazing time waster

Genealogy of Influence a visualization of the connections between the most influential writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians of Western culture. Go here, if you dare.

by Michael Janairo

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s new book

kareem.jpgNPR has a story on On the Shoulder of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance, which takes a look back at the storied history and lasting impact of the Harlem Renaissance Ballroom.

This is the former NBA star‘s latest book. His others include:

  • Brothers In Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII’s Forgotten Heroes
  • Giant Steps
  • Black Profiles in Courage: A Legacy of African-American Achievement
  • A Season on the Reservation: My Soujourn with the White Mountain Apaches
by Michael Janairo

Legacy of slavery

A San Francisco Chronicle review of a new exhibit, “Inhuman History,” at the Museum of the African Diaspora, takes an interesting look at America’s legacy of slavery from the point of view of commercialism.

Though the museum is in San Francisco, Russell Banks gets a mention, as does the state of New York. Here’s a bit from that review:

From grade school on, we are taught about slavery as an abhorrent chapter in the country’s past. Textbooks, movies, novels, historical studies and slave narratives that are still coming to light have richly portrayed slavery’s profound insult and human misery. Abolitionists have remained attractive figures to contemporary writers such as Russell Banks (“Cloudsplitter”), filmmaker Steven Spielberg (“Amistad”), opera composer Kirke Mechem (“John Brown”) and many others. Even period works like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that were once regarded as hopelessly heavy-handed have come in for reconsideration. John Updike recently compared Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book favorably, for its comprehension of race, with Mark Twain’s American masterpiece, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

“Inhuman History” comes at its subject from a different angle, by rooting it in the essentially commercial nature of American culture. In the first of eight panels at MoAD drawn from the “Slavery in New York” show organized by the New York Historical Society, a business letter from New Netherlands Director-General Peter Stuyvesant is identified as the “smoking gun” that fostered the rise of slavery in New Amsterdam (later New York). A photograph of present-day Manhattan identifies the early land grants that supported the slave trade. The city’s present affluence is built on the past.

A short film sustains the argument. New York never aspired to be a refuge or some “shining city on the hill,” we’re told. It was always, with its attractive harbor and other natural assets, a center of commerce and striving. Slavery is one inevitable link in “New York’s enormous significance in the global economy.”

For the full article, go here.

by Michael Janairo

Optimist’s upcoming events

robinson.jpgAlbany-resident Frank S. Robinson’s will be making some appearances in support of his book: LIFE, LIBERTY, and HAPPINESS: An Optimist Manifesto.

MONDAY, February 5, 12 Noon
Schenectady County Public Library (McChesney Room)
99 Clinton Street
Schenectady, NY

SATURDAY, February 10, 2 PM
East Greenbush Community Library
Community Way
E. Greenbush, NY 12061

The book is a comprehensive analysis of how use of reason and human freedom are the keys to living a good life and making a better world. Reader response to it has been terrific! More information can be found at http://www.fsrcoin.com/x.html

by Michael Janairo

Audio Books: ‘The Long Tail’

“The Long Tail,” by Chris Anderson. Read by Christopher Nissley. Unabridged, 8 hours. Hyperion Audio Books. $39.98.

Anderson’s book-length expansion of the 2004 article he wrote for Wired, where he’s the editor in chief, offers a compelling argument for the vitality of his theory of the Long Tail, or what he calls the rise of “niche markets” in economy that has traditionally been based on “hits.”
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by Michael Janairo

First-time novelist’s upcoming events

First-time novelist Fay Rownell — who is now retired but worked as a physical therapist and in the secretarial field — has a couple of events coming up this weekend and later in support of her comic mystery “Death Straight Up.”

She’ll be at the Cohoes Public Library from 10:30 am to noon on Saturday, Feb. 3, and Bookhouse in Stuyvesant Plaza from 2 to 4.

On Feb. 10, she’ll be a the Borders bookstore at Crossgates Mall from 2 to 4 pm.

On Feb. 24, she’ll be at the Borders on Wolf Road from 2 to 4 pm.

by Michael Janairo

Norman Mailer in the news

Norman Mailer’s visit to the New York State Writers Institute isn’t until May 1, but since his latest novel — The Castle in the Forest — just came out, he’s been getting plenty of press.

Here’s a selection:
NPR

The narrator for Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest — his first novel in a decade — is a demon posing as one of Adolf Hitler’s S.S. intelligence officers.

The narrator writes years later about how he guided the early life of the young Hitler, from his conception to early adolescence. Mailer’s devil-narrator is smart, elegant and ironic, and recalls something of Mailer himself — since the narrator rarely meets a boundary he doesn’t break.

Critical Mass interview

To compare Saddam Hussein to Hitler is the kind of thinking you would do in an eighth grade civics class. You can absolutely quote me on this: I really think the level of intellectuality in George Bush’s mind is comparable to the mind of some mediocre teacher who instructs eighth grade pupils in civics. He’s a civics teacher at a middling level, at a dreary middling level.

The Guardian (U.K.)

The celebrated novelist Norman Mailer has walked into a critical maelstrom in Germany with the publication of his new novel – his first for 10 years – which depicts a young and adolescent Adolf Hitler.

The Castle in the Forest, which includes the bed-wetting young Hitler known as “Adi”, has been pummelled by newspaper critics and has angered Germany’s influential Central Council of Jews, which has urged artists to finally leave the history of the dictator alone.