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ALTERNATE LAYOUT FOR WHT GROUND

Saving Our Sons
Dec 1995
Author(s):

Marita Golden
Book Description:

When Marita Golden decided to write her personal account of the challenges of raising a black son in today’s world, she didn’t intend to write more than her own family’s story. But through the story of raising her son against the backdrop of a racially divided society, Golden discovered she was also confronting the causes of the violence that surrounds African-American men.
In the fierecely lyrical and revealing narrative of Saving Our Sons, she has created a work of profound and lasting importance?one that sensitively and uniquely addresses the problems of boyhood and emerging manhood. It is a book that issues a clarion call: The survival of our cities, if not our society, depends on our finding a way to save our sons.
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Mar 1995
Author(s):

Maya Angelou
Book Description:

Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age–and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns about love for herself and the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
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The Serpent's Gift
Sep 1995
Author(s):

Helen Elaine Lee
Awards Won for book: Author of the Year: 1995 - Helen Lee
Book Description:

One of the most striking and heartening developments in American letters in recent years has been the flowering and attendant celebration of African-American writers and of books that have introduced to readers everywhere people, situations, and events that have, hitherto, largely been ignored, denied, or unknown. Now comes Helen Elaine Lee’s supremely assured The Serpent’s Gift, a first novel that gives to us — with the fullest emotional resonance, humor, and exultation in the novelist’s art — the intertwined stories of two families from early in this century to our own times.
Central to this haunting (and sometimes haunted) novel are the mothers, a study in contrast in strength and rigidity, Ruby Staples and Eula Smalls, and their children: LaRue Smalls, adventurer, storyteller, and chronicler of his people; his sister Vesta, intimidated by life from an early age, yet determined, valiant even, to hold her disparate family together; and Ouida Staples, a rare beauty who elects, in the face of convention, to spend her life with another woman. Each will face trials and challenges and sometimes be transformed, shedding like the serpent, an old skin, reborn by the art of invention.
From its opening pages, which recount in eerily compelling detail, the death that will bring these people together, to its almost pastoral conclusion, The Serpent’s Gift creates a world that is both realistic in its detail and lyrical in its presentation — it is a superb, triumphant debut.
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Brothers & Sisters
Jul 1995
Author(s):

Bebe Moore Campbell
Book Description:

"This book is about succeeding—and surviving—even being happy, in a society where every card seems stacked against you. If this is a fair world, Bebe Moore Campbell will be remembered as the most important African-American novelist of this century—except for, maybe, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin."—Carolyn See, Washington Post Book Review
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