Roy Miller's Blog, page 217
April 15, 2017
Lesley Stahl: By the Book
This content was originally published by on 13 April 2017 | 11:00 am.
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What’s the best classic novel you recently read for the first time?
Have we decided that Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet is a classic? A friend gave me the first of that series, “My Brilliant Friend,” for a long plane ride (a couple of months before “the outing”), and I was swept up into the tenements of Naples. Devoured all four books in a long, lovely banquet.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
“The Honeymoon,” by Dinitia Smith. It’s a novel about George Eliot’s love life, and her marriage to a much younger man. I had no idea. Not only is the portrait of Ms. Evans a surprise from Page 1, it is all beautifully written. I don’t understand how it never became a big best seller.
There’s also “The Female Brain,” by Louann Brizendine, which I read and underlined as research for my book on grandmothers. There is no better explanation for why we women act the way we do. I strongly recommend that everyone who’s female read this book, from girls of 16 up to great-grandmas of 96.
Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?
I read a lot of political commentary. In that category I most admire Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal, Frank Bruni of The New York Times, and David Ignatius and Richard Cohen of The Washington Post. And I never pass up a column by Maureen Dowd. I also like biographies: Anything by Doris Goodwin and David Nasaw. And of course, McCullough.
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What’s the last book that made you laugh?
David Rosenfelt’s “Open and Shut,” featuring his lawyer and dog lover Andy Carpenter, who is hilarious. On a long car ride a few years ago my husband (Aaron Latham) put on one of Rosenfelt’s audiobooks. I was bent over laughing the whole ride … and have been addicted ever since.
The last book that made you furious?
Reading Richard Reeves’s “Infamy,” about the Japanese-American internments during World War II, had me in angry tears. The injustice rings, like bells tolling, on every page.
Another book that made me boil was Steven Brill’s “America’s Bitter Pill,” about pharmaceutical companies getting away with charging unconscionably high prices for medicines. Some cancer drugs — that patients would die without — cost more than $200,000 a year.
What’s the best book you’ve read about journalism?
Katharine Graham’s memoir, “Personal History,” got a grip on me. Her unflinching integrity at The Washington Post throughout the Watergate scandal made her the bravest publisher in the country (maybe for all time). My first assignment for CBS News was Watergate, so I had a special interest in the subject. But Mrs. Graham delved deeply into the workings of a newspaper, journalistic decision-making under pressure and the special challenges of a woman standing up to male power in the 1970s. She was remarkably candid too about the sorrows of her personal life. It’s one of the great books about journalism written by a heroine.
Do you have a favorite book about the presidency?
All of Robert Caro’s books on L.B.J. Because of Caro’s almost maniacal research, the books are lush with fine details about events, about the people in Johnson’s life and about the mercurial man himself. I love the way he can spend 100 pages describing the workings of the U.S. Senate, or the loneliness of the isolated hill country of central Texas where Johnson grew up. At a lecture Caro gave on biography, I heard him say that all good books have a strong sense of place, which he set out to infuse into his books. So you come close to being in those lonely Texas hills and in the clubby mustiness of the U.S. Congress. I also loved Doris Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” about Lincoln, and “Barack Obama: The Story,” by David Maraniss.
Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?
I most like biographies and mysteries, and most dislike how-to’s.
How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night?
I like reading a real book, hardcover or paperback. One book at a time. Mostly on airplanes and on weekends.
How do you organize your books?
One beside the other!
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
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“The 12 Days of Christmas,” by Robert Sabuda. It’s a pop-up book, every page a smile.
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?
Heroes: Pierre in “War and Peace,” Jo in “Little Women.” Villain: Richard Nixon.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
I wasn’t much of a reader until high school, when I discovered Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy and Tolstoy. Like so many of us my age, I was awakened by the 19th century! As a kid, I read the Bobbsey Twins … and Nancy Drew (of course).
Which children’s books have you most enjoyed sharing with your grandchildren? And what book do you hope they read before they’re adults?
There’s nothing better than reading a 5-year-old “Charlotte’s Web,” though E. B. White does a fine job of reading it himself. There’s also Franny K. Stein: Books about girls as mad scientists didn’t exist when I was growing up. Though I’m just remembering that I had to read a biography of Marie Curie in school. Wonder if that was only assigned to the girls. I hope my granddaughters read “The Catcher in the Rye,” Harry Potter and “Catch-22” (for a good laugh).
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
The U.S. Constitution. (Does it count as a book?)
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Mark Twain, Jane Goodall and whoever wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
Whom would you want to write your life story?
Aaron Latham!
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Donald Weiser, Occult Publishing Veteran, Dies at 89
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Donald Weiser, who founded the publishing company Samuel Weiser Inc. known today as Red Wheel/Weiser, died at his home in Florida on Wednesday, April 12.
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Don’t Find Your Writing Voice—Accept It
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 14 April 2017 | 9:00 pm.
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I found my voice as a writer rather late in my writing life. I spent about twenty years trying to write fiction. I had read fiction voraciously as a boy and young man, but had largely stopped reading it by the time I decided to try writing it. It was a strange choice in a way, but I didn’t know what else to do. I knew I loved to write, and since fiction was all I’d ever loved to read, I took what seemed like the logical, practical step to try to write it.
This guest post is by William Kenower. Kenower is the author of Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence. He is also the editor in chief of Author magazine, a sought-after speaker and teacher, and the author of Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion. He’s been published in The New York Times and Edible
Seattle, and was a featured blogger on the Huffington Post. His video interviews with hundreds of writers, from Nora Ephron to Amy Tan to William Gibson, are widely considered the best of their kind on the Internet. He also hosts the online radio program Author2Author, where every week he and a different guest discuss the books we write and the lives we lead.
It was not so practical, as it turns out. I was trying to tell stories I had lost interest in hearing. No matter how hard I worked at my craft, no matter how disciplined I was at rewriting what I’d written, I could not overcome the disconnect between my inherent curiosity and the stories I was trying to tell. I cannot command my curiosity; it remains permanently independent of my willpower.
Eventually I found myself writing a daily blog for Author magazine. I was surprised by how easy these posts were for me to write. I loved both the format and the subject. I loved how these little essays were a blend of memoir, observation, and poetry. And I loved writing about the intersection of creativity and spirituality. It was just so interesting. I couldn’t stop thinking about this intersection, whether I was writing, interviewing authors, or just hanging around. It was so interesting that I was surprised when other people weren’t as interested in it as I was.
Soon an odd thing began to happen. People who read my work would occasionally remark how much they enjoyed my voice. I didn’t know what they were talking about. I had stopped thinking about my voice. When I was writing fiction, I obsessed about my voice. I knew how important it was. I knew how much, as a reader, I connected first to the author’s voice, more so than the story. The voice, after all, would be with me in every single word. Now all I was trying to do was share these very interesting ideas. That was my only goal every time I sat down to write.
Which is exactly how you find your voice. If you want to write, you must find your voice. But your voice is not like your singing voice, which can be trained to hit certain notes. Your voice is absolutely an expression of your inherent curiosity. This will determine not just which stories you choose to tell, but how you tell them. It will determine every word you choose, for the words are meant to express as accurately as possible what you find so interesting about the story you are telling.
Yet your inherent curiosity is deceptively easy to take for granted. It has been with you continuously all your life. You are used to it, even if you are not used to listening faithfully to it. This was certainly true for me. As I began writing those essays for Author, I realized I had turned writing into a search for recognition. That had become my primary goal every time I sat down to write fiction—to somehow attract the recognition of agents and publishers and readers. To be recognized, it seemed to me, you had to be special.
I could not manufacture special. However, once I recognized what I was especially interested in, I began to attract the attention of agents, editors, and readers. It really is that simple. It is as simple as accepting that what you find interesting is interesting enough, that what you find funny is funny enough, and that what you find profound is profound enough. Yet every single time I sit down to write, I must remember this. Every time I face the blank page, I must remember that all I have to do is listen to what has been speaking to me my entire life, listen, and give this faithful friend of mine a voice.
In Writing Voice, you’ll discover effective instruction and advice from best-selling authors and instructors like Donald Maass, Adair Lara, Paula Munier, Dinty W. Moore, James Scott Bell, and many others, plus exercises, techniques and examples for making your prose stand out, be it fiction or memoir.
You might also like:
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Power and Punishment – The New York Times
This content was originally published by on 14 April 2017 | 7:23 pm.
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In The New York Times Book Review, Khalil Gibran Muhammad reviews Chris Hayes’s “A Colony in a Nation.” Muhammad writes:
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“A Colony in a Nation” opens with Hayes moving through security checkpoints at the 2000 Republican National Convention. As he hands over his bag, he realizes he has a small amount of marijuana in an eyeglass case. When the police find his stash, they let it pass. “The police officer who’d found the drugs put my bag on a table and looked at me, as if to say, Go ahead and take it.”
Drawing heavily on personal experiences as a white kid growing up in the crack-era Bronx and attending a magnet school on the border of East Harlem, much of Hayes’s book unfolds along the axis of two “distinct regimes” in America. One for whites, what he calls the Nation; the other for blacks, what he calls the Colony.
On this week’s podcast, Hayes talks about “A Colony in a Nation”; Jason Zinoman discusses “Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night”; Jennifer Schuessler has news from the literary world; and Parul Sehgal and John Williams on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.
Here are the books (and the article) mentioned in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:
“Bento’s Sketchbook” by John Berger
“Ghachar Ghochar” by Vivek Shanbhag
“The Possessed” by Elif Batuman
“The Belly of Paris” by Émile Zola
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.
How do I listen? Two ways
From a desktop or laptop , you can listen by pressing play on the button above.
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4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, just tap on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you’ll be able to stream the episode.
On your Android phone or tablet:
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3. Subscribe. Once on the series page, click on the word “subscribe” to have new episodes sent to your phone for free.
4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, just click on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you’ll be able to stream the episode.
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Expands Its Cookbook and Lifestyle Programs
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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With the culinary and lifestyle categories booming, HMH has created a new position to oversee an expansion of its publishing program in those areas.
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Power and Punishment: Two New Books About Race and Crime
This content was originally published by KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD on 14 April 2017 | 7:32 pm.
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Forman, a Yale Law School professor and former Washington, D.C., public defender, has written a masterly account of how a generation of black elected officials wrestled with recurring crises of violence and drug use in the nation’s capital. Beginning in the late 1960s, these officials faced the growing challenge of drug addiction to heroin and later, crack. Forty-five percent of male jail detainees tested positive for heroin in 1969, up from 3 percent in the early ’60s. During roughly the same period the city’s murder rate tripled. By 1987, officials found that 60 percent of Washington arrestees tested positive for crack cocaine.
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Letters to public officials, mined by Forman, reveal that much of the black community did not agree on what to do. No one disputed the facts of rising drug use and ballooning murder rates across the city. Some of the earliest options on the table ranged from decriminalization of marijuana — following the lead of white civil libertarians — to increased sentences. Many agreed that some measure of punitive intervention was necessary. But how much could be deployed without destroying the body politic or the social ecology of black Washington was anybody’s guess. There were also calls for prevention and drug treatment over punishment, targeting poverty as a root cause of crime. A number of local and national civil rights leaders preferred to follow Michigan Representative John Conyers’s proposal for an urban Marshall Plan.
Ultimately, Washington’s black officials embraced the Nixonian law-and-order mood of the nation, passing increasingly tougher laws and adopting aggressive policing practices into the 1990s. Marion Barry, Washington’s future mayor, claimed the mantle of drug warrior (before he fell victim to his own addiction), and the stark and visible pattern of African-Americans increasingly locking up their own was replicated elsewhere. “When an urgent problem required a short-term solution, law enforcement was regarded as the only answer,” Forman writes. In 1978, Washington appointed its first black police chief, Burtell Jefferson, a staunch advocate for mandatory minimum sentencing, to lead the nation’s first black-majority police department. By 1990, there were 130 black police chiefs in the United States and more than 300 black mayors.
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Eric Holder addresses students as part of Operation Ceasefire.
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Keith Jenkins/The Washington Post, via Getty Images
Given a century of brutal, anti-black racism in the criminal justice system after the Civil War, these developments give rise to some obvious questions: When African-American officials finally gained a measure of control over the machinery of the law, why did mass incarceration happen on their watch? In other words, why did they lock up their own?
Forman offers three explanations. First, black officials did not see mass incarceration coming. No one did, he argues. It was “the result of a series of small decisions, made over time, by a disparate group of actors.” (Hayes makes the same point in his book.) Second, after legal segregation fell, African-American class biases came to the fore. Class privilege meant that middle-class and elite blacks had a smaller chance of exposure to criminal victimization and the full hammer of the law, especially long prison sentences. Citing a 1966 University of Michigan study, Forman writes that “a surprising number” of working-class black cops “didn’t like other black people — at least not the poor blacks they tended to police.”
The third reason is a big deal and a major breakthrough. Forman’s novel claim is this: What most explains the punitive turn in black America is not a repudiation of civil rights activism, as some have argued, but an embrace of it. “African-Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals,” he writes. “Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks, African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.” Forman recalls his own experience as a public defender and the case of a 15-year-old first offender who was facing sentencing for handgun possession and a small bag of pot; a black judge, hearing Forman’s plea for leniency, was unmoved. “Dr. King didn’t march and die so that you could be a fool, so that you could be out on the street, getting high, carrying a gun and robbing people,” the judge admonished. “No, young man, that was not his dream.”
In this way, post-civil-rights leaders reimagined Dr. King as a crime crusader. In 1995, one year after Bill Clinton signed the biggest crime bill in American history, the nation’s first black United States attorney for the District of Columbia, Eric Holder, announced a major anti-crime initiative called Operation Ceasefire at a Martin Luther King Day celebration in Arlington: “Did Martin Luther King successfully fight the likes of Bull Connor so that we could ultimately lose the struggle for civil rights to misguided or malicious members of our own race?”
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Marion Barry, candidate for mayor, October 1994.Credit
Nancy Andrews/The Washington Post, via Getty Images
This wasn’t the politics of respectability; it was what Forman calls the “politics of responsibility.” Dr. King’s legacy had become fodder for a national trend of personal responsibility jeremiads aimed at black America. This moment peaked about a decade ago just when Barack Obama, an exemplar of propriety, kicked off his presidential candidacy and Bill Cosby was wrapping up a national “call out” tour, dispensing the gospel of tough love in black communities. “Holder’s answer was straightforward,” Forman writes. “Stop cars, search cars, seize guns.”
Predictably, Operation Ceasefire exacted a heavy toll. Police officers stopped black motorists for seemingly any reason, like tinted windows. Officials knew hit rates for guns would be low — police academy textbooks explained as much. At best, investigatory or pretext stops were supposed to be a deterrent. In reality, they fueled racial disparities in the drug war. The law enforcement equivalent of reverse redlining shielded white Washington neighborhoods — and a few tony black ones — from the program. White motorists were given a “free pass,” Forman writes, to keep their drugs safely stashed in their glove boxes. Operation Ceasefire and similar practices elsewhere made it much more likely that black women, for instance, would be arrested on minor drug charges than white men with much higher rates of gun possession and violent crime. Forman gives the example of Sandra Dozier, who was stopped by Ceasefire enforcers in 2000 and lost a good job at FedEx because they found two small bags of pot in her glove box.
Chris Hayes, the host of a news show on MSNBC and the author of “Twilight of Elites,” spent many days covering the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown, and he counts himself among the many white men whose minor drug offenses did not earn him a rap sheet or cost him his career. “A Colony in a Nation” opens with Hayes moving through security checkpoints at the 2000 Republican National Convention. As he hands over his bag, he realizes he has a small amount of marijuana in an eyeglass case. When the police find his stash, they let it pass. “The police officer who’d found the drugs put my bag on a table and looked at me, as if to say, Go ahead and take it.”
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Drawing heavily on personal experiences as a white kid growing up in the crack-era Bronx and attending a magnet school on the border of East Harlem, much of Hayes’s book unfolds along the axis of two “distinct regimes” in America. One for whites, what he calls the Nation; the other for blacks, what he calls the Colony. “In the Nation, you have rights; in the Colony, you have commands,” Hayes explains. “In the Nation, you are innocent until proven guilty; in the Colony, you are born guilty.” At first mention the metaphor seems overdrawn, and eventually it slips a bit under its own weight. White Americans are also subject to “out of control” policing, he writes, because “policing of the Colony has breached the levee and flooded the Nation” too.
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But among white Americans, ideas about the collective guilt of black Americans exert a powerful pull. In the Colony, individual guilt or innocence is largely irrelevant. Hayes tells story after story of innocent black suspects routinely standing in for the guilty. Broken windows, stop and frisk, and Ferguson-style revenue policing (“the model of cops as armed tax collectors”) are all presented as evidence of how the separate system works. Even for black homicide victims, detectives in some cities fail to clear half of all murder cases. Many historians have long noted that black folk are simultaneously overpoliced and underprotected. Hayes writes that violence by police or by gangs are “two sides of the same coin.” As such, the Nation evinces a peculiar circular logic: The harm black people do to one another “justifies” the harm the state does in their name. By contrast, the premium on white victimization in the Nation is “painfully clear to people living in the Colony,” Hayes writes. “White lives matter, and it hardly needs to be spoken.”
Taken together “A Colony in a Nation” and “Locking Up Our Own” compel readers to wrestle with some very tough questions about the nature of American democracy and its deep roots in racism, inequality and punishment. Both authors find hope in a shared vision of a future society that protects human dignity and seeks accountability rather than vengeance. “What would the politics of crime look like in a place where people worried not only about victimization but also about the costs of overly punitive policing and prosecution?” Hayes asks. Forman imagines redefining our core values: “What if we strove for compassion, for mercy, for forgiveness? And what if we did this for everybody, including people who have harmed others?”
Because, finally, there may be no pathway to end mass incarceration without reconsidering our handling of all crimes, not just nonviolent ones. Fifty-three percent of all state prisoners are serving time for violent offenses, most commonly robbery. Racism and mass incarceration are systemic problems, but both Forman and Hayes show that the solution will lie not only with policy changes but with individual changes of heart too.
Forman recalls that a 16-year-old he defended was saved from incarceration by the testimony of the victim, who told the judge he didn’t want the teenager to be sent to prison. A system built to make “teeth rattle,” as described by Atlanta’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, is not a system capable of transformation; we need to build a new foundation. We need to choose to do it. “Mass incarceration,” Forman writes, “was constructed incrementally, and it may have to be dismantled the same way.”
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April 14, 2017
Like His Publisher, Crime Novelist Alex Segura Wears Many Hats
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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This month, Polis books will publish 'Dangerous Ends,' the third novel in the Pete Fernandez mystery series written by Segura, who is also senior v-p of publicity and marketing at Archie Comics.
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Patricia McKissack, Prolific Author Who Championed Black Heroes, Dies at 72
This content was originally published by SAM ROBERTS on 14 April 2017 | 8:55 pm.
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Fred Jr. said his parents had shared a “missionary zeal” to write books about black personalities “where there hadn’t been any before.”
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While Ms. McKissack always said that her books were the product of a lifelong partnership with her husband, who died in 2013, most of her folkloric fiction appeared under her name alone and was written, she explained, to fill another void in the canon.
“When children don’t see themselves in books, they aren’t motivated to read,” she told Professor Smith, who has written extensively about black heroes. “If children don’t read often they usually don’t read well. And soon that translates into failure. I don’t want that to happen, so I try to create characters children enjoy reading about.”
Her “Mirandy and Brother Wind” (1988) won a Caldecott honor for distinguished picture book, and “The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural” (1992) won another prestigious award, a Newbery honor, for an outstanding contribution to children’s literature. The couple’s books won nine Coretta Scott King Author and Honor awards.
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Patricia McKissack wrote folkloric fiction, like “The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural” (1992), which won a Newbery honor.
Credit
Knopf Books for Young Readers
The New York Times Book Review called the couple’s “Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman?” (1992), about the 19th-century black abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, “arguably the best” biography of her for young readers. And it praised Ms. McKissack’s “refreshing candor” in a 1989 biography of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.
“At first glance, it may seem the book is meant for an intelligent student in the middle grades,” the reviewer, Rosemary L. Bray, wrote. “But Patricia McKissack is excellent at conveying sophisticated themes and ideas, so that ‘Jesse Jackson: A Biography’ can be read with pleasure by both children and young adults.”
Ms. McKissack and her son Fred Jr., a writer, together wrote “Best Shot in the West: The Adventures of Nat Love” (illustrated by Randy DuBurke and published in 2012), which The Times called a “gripping graphic novel.”
She was born Patricia L’Ann Carwell on Aug. 9, 1944, in Smyrna, Tenn. Her family moved to St. Louis when she was 3.
Her father, Robert, was successively an administrator of the city jail, convention center and airport. Her mother, the former Erma Petway, was a hospital admissions aide. She was raised in St. Louis and in Kirkwood, Tenn., and moved to Nashville after her parents divorced when she was in junior high school.
As a young girl, she had pen pals in three countries, wrote poetry and was a frequent visitor to her local library, which she later remembered as a lifesaver.
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In 1964, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University (now Tennessee State University) in Nashville, where she became reacquainted with her childhood friend Fred McKissack, who was studying civil engineering and hailed from a family of prominent architects. He proposed marriage on their second date.
In addition to Fred Jr., she is survived by two other sons, John and Robert; a brother, Robert Carwell; a sister, Sarah Stuart, and five grandchildren.
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The New York Times Book Review called the McKissacks’ book “Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman?” (1992), about the 19th-century black abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, “arguably the best” biography of her for young readers.Credit
Scholastic
Ms. McKissack earned a master’s degree at Webster University in Missouri while teaching English to eighth graders and writing to college students. At the same time, she wrote radio scripts and freelance magazine articles. She was children’s book editor of Concordia Publishing House, an affiliate of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, from 1976 to 1981.
But in the early 1980s, the couple had a transformative conversation on a park bench. She was in tears because his contracting business was failing. He asked her what she would do if she could choose anything. Write books, she said.
“Let’s do it,” Mr. McKissack said, “and I’ll help you.”
He closed his business — temporarily, he thought — and they began a three-decade collaboration, working at almost identical desks in their home library.
Their first book together was a biography of her mother’s favorite poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, published a decade after she had been unable to find one for her students in the junior high school library. They wrote a dozen more.
Her latest book, published in January, was “Let’s Clap, Jump, Sing & Shout; Dance, Spin & Turn It Out!,” a celebration of childhood stories and songs. Another, “What Is Given From the Heart, Reaches the Heart,” is to be released in 2019.
In writing “Let’s Clap,” she told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, she was struck that some of the same songs and stories that defined the civil rights movement of the 1960s still reverberate.
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“It bothers me that we still have reason to sing them,” Ms. McKissack said. “You have to ask, ‘Why are we singing songs that applied to us in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s?’ Here we are in the new century, and we’re still dealing with the craziness.”
She wrote her hundred or more books, she said, “to tell a different story — one that has been marginalized by mainstream history; one that has been distorted, misrepresented or just plain forgotten,” and she urged other blacks to write more, too.
“Writing,” she said, “is a kind of freedom.”
Correction: April 14, 2017
An obituary on Thursday about the children’s-book author Patricia McKissack misspelled the given name of her husband, who was also her collaborator, and that of one of their sons. Her husband was Fredrick, not Frederick, as is the son named for him. The error was repeated in a picture caption.
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In Praise of the Coffee Table Book
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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That beautiful book sitting on the coffee table isn't just for decoration. Open it up.
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An Easter Sales Bounce for Board Books: The Weekly Scorecard
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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It looks like board books will be popular gifts for Easter this year. Unit sales of the format soared 83% in the week ended Apr. 9, 2017 over the comparable week in 2016.
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