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RECENT BOOKS  KAISER

Negro Intellectual on the Harlem Renaissance, says that black artists of the 1920's failed to deal seriously with black folk culture. Given the U.S. social and cultural situation at the time, they really did very well. Huggins, echoing A. Meier's Negro Thought in America on Du Bois, is wrong again. Du Bois, and other black leaders, attempted to build and preserve the black community while at the same time fighting to extend black rights in the white world. There was no contradiction here and this didn't nullify Du Bois's political program. The degree of emphasis on one or the other depended on the treatment of Blacks in the larger white society at any given time. Isn't it true that white critics always praise as sophisticated books like Cruse's and Huggins's that come down hard on Blacks and accuse them of being deficient and contradictory in their cultural and political strivings?)

Huggins, Nathan I., Martin Kilson and Daniel M. Fox (editors). KEY ISSUES IN THE AFRO-AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich. $10.50 (cloth); $3.50 each of two vols. (paper). (Has original and reprinted essays by John H. Bracey, Jr., Martin Kilson, St. Clair Drake, Herbert Aptheker, Benjamin Quarles, Basil Davidson and others.)

Jackson, Jesse. THE SICKEST DON'T ALWAYS DIE THE QUICKEST. New York: Doubleday. 185 pages. $3.95. (A book for children by a black writer of five other children's books such as Call Me Charley, Anchor Man and Tessie.)

Johnston, Johanna. PAUL CUFFEE: AMERICA'S FIRST BLACK CAPTAIN. Illustrated by Elton C. Fax. New York: Dodd, Mead. 93 pages. $3.50. (A book for children.)

Jones, Max and John Chilton. LOUIS: THE LOUIS ARMSTRONG STORY. Boston: Little, Brown, 200 photographs. $9.50. (The late Satchmo's own life story. A recent biography is Hugues Panassie's Louis Armstrong. Panassie, a French critic of jazz music, was Armstrong's friend for 40 years.)

Joplin, Scott. THE COLLECTED WORKS OF SCOTT JOPLIN edited by Vera Brodsky Lawrence. (2 vols.). New York Public Library, Lincoln Center. (This is a badly needed rescue of the works of the black genius of ragtime. There is an exhibition of Joplin and ragtime at the Lincoln Center public library branch; Joplin's opera Treemonisha will be produced in Atlanta, Ga.; there was a concert of Joplin's music in October at the Lincoln Center library; and there is a Nonesuch recording of Scott Joplin's music played by pianist Joshua Rifkin.)

Jordan, June. HIS OWN WHERE. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. 90 pages. $3.95. (A story of black teen-agers written by the author of Who Look at Me and Some Changes, both poetry.)

Jordan, Norman. ABOVE MAYA. Jordan Press, P.O. Box 1852, Cleveland, Ohio 44106. 50 pages. (A book of poetry by the talented black author of the long-running In the Last Days: A Black Theatre Ritual at Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio.)

Katz, William Loren. THE BLACK WEST: A DOCUMENTARY AND PICTORIAL HISTORY. New York: Doubleday. xiii; 336 pages. $12.95. (When Katz brought out his big documentary Eyewitness: The Negro in American History in 1967, there were many hitherto unpublished documents among the various types of eyewitness accounts. And there were chapters on Blacks on the frontier before and after the Civil War. The 1971 edition [13th printing] of 

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