This Month's Articles
ESSAY
Why We Take Malcolm Gladwell Very Seriously
What the Dog Saw: and other adventures
by Malcolm Gladwell
An essay by Jan Alexander
Some of us are old enough to remember a distant era when the new millennium had just dawned and anything seemed possible, and the stock market was irrationally exuberant, thanks to something called ‘The New Economy’. In those days, I worked for a dot.com where we wore jeans and tee-shirts to work, didn’t believe in private offices, and posted stories about 20 year old dot.com billionaires. In conversations, the name Malcolm Gladwell would come up with relative frequency, uttered with reverence around our wall-less workspace. His first book, The Tipping Point, helped us prepare for the revolution we were sure was on its way, and .....Read More
REVIEWING
Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama
by Peniel E. Joseph
Reviewed by Herb Boyd
President Barack Obama wasn’t in the Oval Office a year before the books about him and his historic victory began to surface and some of them were predictable and inevitable. Dr. Peniel E. Joseph’s Dark Days, and Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama is not among such expected treatises. He is less concerned about how Obama won, his political philosophy, the nature of his governance, or whether he will .....Read More
MEMOIR
…and Mistakes Made Along the Way, an excerpt from a memoir
by Fred Beauford
Chapter Four—Black folks
One day, after about five years into my years in the Bronx, something life changing occurred. I was fourteen. That day, when I walked into my homeroom class, there was a black kid sitting there, the first one we had, besides me. There were five other black kids in my junior high school, but until now, none in my homeroom, or in my grade.
His name was James Johnson. I don’t remember being shocked, or having any emotions at all at seeing him. He was just another new kid.
However, in a few weeks I was in a state .....Read More
ESSAY
The Lacuna
by Barbara Kingsolver
An essay by Sarah Vogelsong
In the last issue of The Neworld Review, Fred Beauford noted the widespread worry among the general population about such major political issues as war and the economy. Given such circumstances, it is impossible that these subjects would not creep into and color our literature, and particularly that narrow slice of literature that seeks to move beyond escapism and uncover the layers of meaning that are intertwined with our world today. The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel since Prodigal Summer, is one such book that grapples with the intersection of politics, daily life, .....Read More
READING
"eBooks: The Ever-Evolving Face of Knowledge"
by Jamie Metrick
Since the first drop of ink touched the first piece of parchment, writing has been a source of power. In the days of the first books, all of the knowledge that humans amassed was painstakingly recorded by a select few. Only a handful of the rich owned books; even less could actually read them. And yet for thousands of years, terrible men did dreadful things because they knew what the little squiggles on the fragile scrolls meant.
Knowledge is power. Books house knowledge. Jump forward in time .....Read More
BEYOND BOOKS: films
The African Diaspora Film Festival -- Seventeen Years and Counting
by Loretta H. Campbell
“An African filmmaker holding a camera is a revolutionary act,” says Reinaldo Barroso-Spech, cofounder of the African Diaspora Film Festival (ADFF). He is quoting the renowned Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène.
Indeed, film can be the great equalizer simply by documenting the humanity of a people.
It follows that those who distribute or present Afro-centric films can be seen as rebels. Such is the case with Reinaldo and his wife Diarah N’Daw-Spech, founding partners of ArtMattan Productions, in New York City, the distribution .....Read More
REVIEWING
War Dances
By Sherman Alexie
Reviewed by Sally Cobau
When I was an artist-in-residence several years ago on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, I used Sherman Alexie in my high school classes. After one of the classes, a student asked if he could borrow The Toughest Indian in the World, the short story collection I had been using. Though I had censored my selections and was a little wary of him reading the “uncensored parts,” I handed it over. I don’t even know if he read the book, but .....Read More
Distant Voices
Write Me A Letter...
Dear Fred
The myth of Louis Armstrong (Vol_2 No_8 Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong) as Uncle Tom-the-Trumpeter has become a very fashionable one, particularly as taught in today’s university cultural studies programs. Truth be told, he did not begin to caricature himself in his later years; even as a young man he was always ready to clown and mug his way through the second-rate Tin Pan Alleys songs his manager Glazer put in front of him. The words to those banal tunes of the 1920s and 30s which he recorded with his band are now forgotten .....Read More
REVIEWING
James Naismith: The Man Who Invented Basketball
By Rob Rains
Review By Ken Liebeskind
A basketball aficionado would like two questions answered by James Naismith: The Man Who Invented Basketball: how did Naismith exactly invent the game and how was it initially played?
Rob Rains, the sports writer who has written a series of baseball and one football book(s), answers the first question at the outset of his biography of Naismith by following the Scottish immigrant from his childhood home in the farming community of Almonte, Canada, to Springfield, MA, where he became a .....Read More
REVIEWING
Rooftops of Tehran
by Mahbod Seraji
Reviewed by Jane M McCabe
Iran is in the news these days either because of Western fears she is developing nuclear weapons (which could upset the balance of power in the Middle East and the world) or because her people are demonstrating against what they consider to be election fraud. Thousands of Iranians have poured into the street of Tehran to protest the re-election of Ahmadinejad, the narrow-eyed, wiry president who has the audacity to.....Read More
REVIEWING
The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
Reviewed by Janet Garber
Miss Skeeter’s been buzzing around her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, trying to survive, while hoping she doesn’t inadvertently sting the wrong people. The year is 1963 and the times, they are a-changin,’ for sure. Medgar Evers just got whacked, the march on Washington with Martin Luther King’s sharing his dreams is about to occur, and then President Kennedy. . . Tensions are high and everyone is feeling threatened. But in Skeeter’s world, the white “haves” are carrying on pretty much as they always.....Read More
REVIEWING
The Good, the Bad and the Not So Pretty
From Ghetto to Ghetto: An African American Journey to Judaism
Ernest H. Adams
Reviewed by Daji Kuweza
The Good:
Writing an autobiography is a task that carries the potential for perilous revelations about oneself and those we know. The author, Ernest H. Adams, does an excellent job of making the reader aware of all his imperfections and insecurities as he struggles to overcome them and ‘make something of himself’. His epilogue provides a fantastic summary of his obstacles and triumphs and proposes a philosophical view of what African-Americans need to do in order to adapt to the changing world as full members.....Read More