AALBC.com eNewsletter - November 30th 2010 - Issue #183
Celebrating Our Literary Legacy Since 1997

AALBC.com Best Selling Books

AALBC.com's 25 Best Selling Books September 1st through October 31st 2010
http://aalbc.com/books/bestsellers.htm

Fiction

#1 - For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange
#2 - Getting to Happy by Terry McMillan
#3 - Prime Choice: Perry Skky Jr. Series #1 by Stephanie Perry Moore
#4 - Dirty Red: A Novel by Vickie M. Stringer
#5 - Every Thug Needs A Lady by Wahida Clark
#6 - Gather Together in My Name by Maya Angelou
#7 - Zane's Sex Chronicles by Zane

 

Non-fiction

#1 - Confessions of a Video Vixen by Karrine Steffans
#2 - The Vixen Manual: How to Find, Seduce & Keep the Man You Want by Karrine Steffans
#3 - We Need to Talk by Robert G. Barnes
#4 - From Superman to Man by J. A. Rogers
#5 - Letters to a Young Brother: MANifest Your Destiny by Hill Harper
#6 - The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-Hop By Saul Williams
#7 - The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Click to view all 25 top selling fiction and non-fiction titles

Authors You Should Know

Pat Tucker
http://authors.aalbc.com/pat_tucker.html

By day, Pat Tucker Wilson works as a radio news director in Houston, TX. By night, she is a talented writer with a knack for telling page-turning stories. A former television news reporter, she draws on her background to craft stories readers will love. With more than 15 years of media experience, the award-winning broadcast journalist has worked as a reporter for ABC, NBC and Fox affiliate TV stations and Radio stations in California and Texas.

Tucker's most recent novel Daddy by Default was published by Strebor Books on November 9, 2010.



Dr. Frances Cress Welsing
http://aalbc.com/authors/frances.htm

Welsing suggested that African American families must operate more effectively if they are to produce "strong-minded" children who can "challenge" white supremacy. In an interview in Essence, she told Karen Halliburton, "No Black female should have children before the age of 30, and no Black man should become a father before the age of 35. Before child rearing, we should be going to school, going to the library, educating ourselves. We must create mature, mentally developed parents. Then we will be able to produce children with self-respect and a high-level functioning pattern."

Dr. Welsing is the author of the AALBC.com best selling book: The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors (Third World Press, December 1991)



Thomas Sayers Ellis
http://aalbc.com/authors/thomas_sayers_ellis.html

Ellis is a poet and photographer. Ellis also co-founded The Dark Room Collective (in Cambridge, Massachusetts); and received his M.F.A. from Brown University. He is the author of The Maverick Room (2005), which won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and a recipient of a Mrs. Giles Whiting Writers’ Award. His poems and photographs have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Callaloo, Best American Poetry (1997, 2001 and 2010), Grand Street, The Baffler, Jubilat, Tin House, Poetry, and The Nation.

Skin, Inc. is the latest work by "one of the most audacious and provocative poets now writing." (Greywolf Press, August 31st 2010)



Ellis Cose
http://aalbc.com/authors/ellis_cose.html

Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker. Cose’s debut radio production effort, Against the Odds, aired in 2008 in more than 100 radio markets in the United States—including eight stations in the top 11 markets.



Dinaw Mengestu
http://aalbc.com/authors/dinaw_mengestu.html

Dinaw Mengestu was born, in 1978, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. He is the recipient of a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Lannan Literary Award, and received a "5 under 35" Award from the National Book Foundation.

His first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead Hardcover, October 14, 2010), was named a New York Times Notable Book and awarded the Guardian First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, among numerous other honors.



Janks Morton
http://aalbc.com/authors/janks.html

Janks Morton is a groundbreaking international and award winning Documentarian. As founder of iYago Entertainment Group, LLC, he states "the company came into existence to reflect both the conscious and the unconscious soul of Black America.

Morton has been in the entertainment industry for more than 20 years and is a much sought-after teacher, lecturer, commentator and motivational speaker. He has convened workshops, seminars and served as panelist and keynote speaker at colleges, universities, prisons, conferences, churches and community centers around the world.

AALBC.com Book Reviews (Non-Fiction)

The Next Big Story by Soledad O’Brien
http://aalbc.com/reviews/next_big_story.html

In The Next Big Story, Soledad revisits her challenging formative years in order to illustrate how overcoming childhood adversity perhaps served to shape not only her personality but her compassionate approach to her career as a television journalist at CNN. Whether it was being asked “Are you black?” by a portrait photographer at the age of 11, being teased “If you’re a [N-word] why don’t you have big lips?” by an 8th grader in the hallway at school, or having to hear “Why do I have to sit next to the black girl?” coming from the sister of a friend, Soledad suffered a host of indignities on the path to the peak of her profession.



Black Faces in White Places: 10 Game-Changing Strategies to Achieve Success and Find Greatness by Randal Pinkett and Jeffrey Robinson
http://aalbc.com/reviews/black_faces_in_white_places.html

As a journalist privileged to have access to many celebrities, a question I often like to ask in interviews with African-American captains of industry is how they managed to flourish in a predominantly white environment where so many other talented blacks have simultaneously failed to do so. Now, we finally have a satisfactory answer to that query thanks to Dr. Randal Pinkett, winner of Donald Trump’s reality show The Apprentice.

For in conjunction with his longtime business partner, Dr. Jeffrey Robinson, Randal has written a viable blueprint for blacks trying to make it in corporate America. The book opens with a discussion of what the authors call the four dimensions, by which they mean the critical workplace issues African-Americans are apt to find themselves grappling with, namely, matters having to do with identity, meritocracy, society and opportunity.



Is It Just Me? Or Is It Nuts Out There? by Whoopi Goldberg
http://aalbc.com/reviews/is_it_just_me.html

All over the country nowadays, we’re witnessing a frightening decline in civility, whether it’s teens being bullied to the point of suicide, tourists being subjected to searches at airports that look more like foreplay than pat downs, or simply people talking loudly on cell phones in places where it’s rude or illegal to do so. In the political realm, we’ve heard mudslinging candidates refer to opponents as a “witch,” “whore” or “degenerate idiot,” a Republican can interrupt the President’s State of the Union speech to call him a liar, and even a fellow Democrat tell Obama to “shove it.”

Weighing-in on this disturbing trend is comedienne Whoopi Goldberg, herself no stranger to such controversy. You may remember how she and fellow co-host Joy Behar recently became so exasperated by what they considered to be anti-Muslim remarks by guest Bill O’Reilly that they stormed off the set of their own show, The View.



Decoded by Jay-Z
http://aalbc.com/reviews/decoded.html

Shawn Corey Carter, aka Jay-Z, wasn’t always a cultural icon married to Beyonce’ who had parlayed his success as a rap artist into a multi-millionaire empire with a host of diverse holdings ranging from a record label to a music publishing company to a clothing line to a nightclub chain to an NBA team. No, he spent his formative years in the Marcy Housing Projects in Bed-Stuy, before moving to Trenton where he dropped out of school to sell crack on the streets while pursuing a hip-hop career.

Relatively-sophisticated musings making sense of rants about a “Hard Knock Life” coming from an insightful 40 year-old ostensibly no longer full of the angst which had helped skyrocket him to the heights of super-stardom.