Graphic Novels for Black History Month

     I recently picked up four graphic novels about Black history recently that you may be interested in.

    

    The first two are Incognegro and its prequel, Incognegro Renaissance. They are interesting mysteries set in the 1920s, with interesting twists. The author, Mat Johnson, was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and the investigators who documented cases of discrimination and lynching throughout the country. Like his main character, Johnson is a black man who has a very light complexion, and, in fact, could "pass" for white. His character, Zane, is a writer, and he uses his skin color to infiltrate white racist lynch mobs and organizations. He then writes the stories using the pen name Incognegro, a play on the word incognito. In these books, he finds himself embroiled in a couple of interesting cases. 

    Strange Fruit  is a two volume set of short biographies of important and interesting black Americans that the majority of Americans may not know about, written by Joel Christian Gill.  Each book has 10 or 12 stories, several of the stories were new to me. They were all interesting, and well told graphically.

Books to Look Forward to in 2021, Part 3 of 3

  My To-Be-Read list grows and grows. I just can't keep up.  So what do I do? I look up lists of books scheduled to be released in 2021. Makes perfect sense, right? After looking at a few lists, I thought I would share ten of the titles that sound really interesting to me. ( Amazon's descriptions used, with my thoughts in italics.)

    

From Kliph Nesteroff, “the human encyclopedia of comedy” (Vice), comes the important and underappreciated story of Native Americans and comedy.

It was one of the most reliable jokes in Charlie Hill’s stand-up routine: “My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York. We had a little real estate problem.” In We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, acclaimed comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff focuses on one of comedy’s most significant and little-known stories: how, despite having been denied representation in the entertainment industry, Native Americans have influenced and advanced the art form. 

The account begins in the late 1880s, when Native Americans were forced to tour in wild west shows as an alternative to prison. (One modern comedian said it was as “if a Guantanamo detainee suddenly had to appear on X-Factor.”) This is followed by a detailed look at the life and work of seminal figures such as Cherokee humorist Will Rogers and Hill, who in the 1970s was the first Native American comedian to appear on The Tonight Show. Also profiled are several contemporary comedians, including Jonny Roberts, a social worker from the Red Lake Nation who drives five hours to the closest comedy club to pursue his stand-up dreams; Kiowa-Apache comic Adrianne Chalepah, who formed the touring group the Native Ladies of Comedy; and the 1491s, a sketch troupe whose satire is smashing stereotypes to critical acclaim. 

As Ryan Red Corn, the Osage member of the 1491s, says: “The American narrative dictates that Indians are supposed to be sad. It’s not really true and it’s not indicative of the community experience itself... Laughter and joy is very much a part of Native culture.” Featuring dozens of original interviews and the exhaustive research that is Nesteroff’s trademark, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem is a powerful tribute to a neglected legacy. 

    I enjoyed Nesteroff's book The Comedians, and it was packed with history. Native American comedians? That's not something most people are familiar with, although most people who have heard of Will Rogers probably know that he was a Cherokee. In fact, Native Americans have long been stereotyped as being grim and humorless people. 

In the tenth book in the multimillion-selling Killing series, Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard take on their most dramatic subject yet: The Mob.

Killing the Mob is the tenth audiobook in Bill O'Reilly's number-one New York Times best-selling series of popular narrative histories, with sales of nearly 18 million copies worldwide, and over 320 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. 

O’Reilly and co-author Martin Dugard trace the brutal history of 20th-century organized crime in the United States, and expertly plumb the history of this nation’s most notorious serial robbers, con men, murderers, and especially, mob family bosses. Covering the period from the 1930s to the 1980s, O’Reilly and Dugard trace the prohibition-busting bank robbers of the Depression Era, such as John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby-Face Nelson. In addition, the authors highlight the creation of the Mafia Commission, the power struggles within the “Five Families”, the growth of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, the mob battles to control Cuba, Las Vegas, and Hollywood, as well as the personal war between the US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and legendary Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. 

O’Reilly and Dugard turn these legendary criminals and their true-life escapades into a listen that rivals the most riveting crime novel. With Killing the Mob, their hit series is primed for its greatest success yet.

    Mobsters, gangsters? will that topic ever cease to be interesting? O'Reilly/Dugard books are usually good for a quick read. I think their books are meant for a general audience, so people who know a lot about their subjects may feel their books are a bit superficial, but I have not been disappointed by the 3-4 books I've read.

A new biography of the intellectual father of Southern secession—the man who set the scene for the Civil War, and whose political legacy still shapes America today.

John C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. First elected to Congress in 1810, Calhoun went on to serve as secretary of war and vice president. But he is perhaps most known for arguing in favor of slavery as a "positive good" and for his famous doctrine of "state interposition," which laid the groundwork for the South to secede from the Union—and arguably set the nation on course for civil war.

Calhoun has catapulted back into the public eye in recent years, as some observers connected the strain of radical politics he developed to the tactics and extremism of the modern Far Right, and as protests over racial injustice have focused on his legacy. In this revelatory biographical study, historian Robert Elder shows that Calhoun is even more broadly significant than these events suggest, and that his story is crucial for understanding the political climate in which we find ourselves today. By excising Calhoun from the mainstream of American history, he argues, we have been left with a distorted understanding of our past and no way to explain our present.

Few men have had a bigger role in American history than John C. Calhoun.  In fact, he is often called part of the American Triumvirate with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.  I loved H.W. Brands' book about them called Heirs of the Founders. I've already pre-ordered my copy

The explosive true saga of the legendary figure, Daniel Boone, and the bloody struggle for America's frontier by two best-selling authors at the height of their writing power - Bob Drury and Tom Clavin.

It is the mid-18th century, and in the 13 colonies founded by Great Britain, anxious colonists desperate to conquer and settle North America’s "First Frontier" beyond the Appalachian Mountains engage in a never-ending series of bloody battles. These violent conflicts are waged against the Native American tribes whose lands they covet, the French, and finally against the mother country itself in an American Revolution destined to reverberate around the world.

This is the setting of Blood and Treasure, and the guide to this epic narrative is none other than America’s first and arguably greatest pathfinder Daniel Boone - not the coonskin cap-wearing caricature of popular culture but the flesh-and-blood frontiersman and military hero whose explorations into the forested frontier beyond the great mountains would become the stuff of legend. Now, thanks to painstaking research by two award-winning authors, the story of the brutal birth of the United States is told through the eyes of both the ordinary and larger-than-life men and women, white and red, who witnessed it.

This fast-paced and fiery narrative, fueled by contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts, is a stirring chronicle of the conflict over America’s "First Frontier" that places the listener at the center of this remarkable epoch and its gripping tales of courage and sacrifice.

    Daniel Boone was one of the first giants in American popular culture and folklore, with his legend beginning even during his lifetime. In truth, he was one of the first American trailblazers, literally, and his life just may measure up to the legend. I have already pre-ordered this book as well.

Books to Look Forward To in 2021, Part 2 of 3

 My To-Be-Read list grows and grows. I just can't keep up.  So what do I do? I look up lists of books scheduled to be released in 2021. Makes perfect sense, right? After looking at a few lists, I thought I would share ten of the titles that sound really interesting to me. ( Amazon's descriptions used, with my thoughts in italics.)

A quest to explore some of the most spectacular ancient cities in human history—and figure out why people abandoned them.

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes readers on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.

Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia.

Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.

    "Everything old is new again" may be a theme of this book. One of the truisms of studying history is that humans are humans. At the core of every historic event or period is the fact that humans have the same or similar emotions, desires, fears, and traits that drive them to do what they do. Just how much has humanity evolved, really? I think this book will be an interesting read.

A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present—edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.

The story begins in 1619—a year before the Mayflower—when the White Lion disgorges “some 20-and-odd Negroes” onto the shores of Virginia, inaugurating the African presence in what would become the United States. It takes us to the present, when African Americans, descendants of those on the White Lion and a thousand other routes to this country, continue a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles, stunning achievements, and millions of ordinary lives passing through extraordinary history. 

Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, each of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness. 

This is a history that illuminates our past and gives us new ways of thinking about our future, written by the most vital and essential voices of our present.

    Stamped From the Beginning, by Kendi, is one of the most important books that I've ever read, and I learned a lot from it. I love the concept of this book, using different voices to frame  five-year periods of history.

A single photograph—an exceptionally rare “action shot” documenting the horrific final moment of the murder of a family—drives a riveting process of discovery for a gifted Holocaust scholar

In 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler’s Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators. A Ukrainian shooter’s rifle is inches from a woman's head, obscured in a cloud of smoke. She is bending forward, holding the hand of a barefooted little boy. And—only one of the shocking revelations of Wendy Lower’s brilliant ten-year investigation of this image—the shins of another child, slipping from the woman’s lap.
 
Wendy Lower’s forensic and archival detective work—in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States—recovers astonishing layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in Ukraine. The identities of mother and children, of the killers—and, remarkably, of the Slovakian photographer who openly took the image, as a secret act of resistance—are dramatically uncovered. Finally, in the hands of this brilliant exceptional scholar, a single image unlocks a new understanding of the place of the family unit in the ideology of Nazi genocide. 

    The author's book, Hitler's Furies was an interesting look at women in the Nazi movement and the Holocaust. This is an interesting premise, but I love the story of the inspiration.  A lot of great historic discoveries and books begin with the smallest fragment of information, maybe a letter, an artifact, or, as in this case, a single photograph. From that single thing, historians become detectives, digging deeer and deeper to unlock the truth. This process is history in a nutshell