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RECENT BOOKS

ERNEST KAISER
(Books reviewed in this number of FREEDOMWAYS have been omitted.)

THE NEGRO IN THE U.S.

Alhamisi, Ahmed Akinwole. HOLY GHOSTS: POEMS. Broadside Press, 12651 Old Mill Place, Detroit, Mich. 48238. 62 pages. $1.95 (paper). (Alhamisi co-edited Black Arts: An Anthology of Black Creations. Another book of poetry from Broadside Press is William A. Thigpen, Jr's Down Nigger Paved Streets.) 

Allen, James Egert. BLACK HISTORY-PAST AND PRESENT. New York: Exposition Press, 212 pages. $7.00 (This is a collection of articles, historical and current, which were published originally in the New York Amsterdam News. Allen, a veteran New York Black teacher, lecturer, writer and authority on Black history, is the author of The Negro in New York and is now writing a biography of Arthur A. Schomburg.)

Allyn, Paul. THE PICTURE LIFE OF HERMAN BADILLO. New York: Franklin Watts. 48 pages. $3.50. (A book for children about Badillo, the fighting Puerto Rican Congressman from New York City.)

Baldwin, James. NO NAME IN THE STREET. New York: Dial Press. 197 pages. $5.95. (This is Baldwin's first book of nonfiction and personal statement since The Fire Next Time in 1963 although he and Margaret Mead published A Rap on Race in 1971. The book is being widely advertised and has been selected by the Book Find Club and the Saturday Review Book Club.) 

Baraka, Imamu Amiri (editor). AFRICAN CONGRESS: A DOCUMENTARY OF THE FIRST MODERN PAN-AFRICAN CONGRESS. New York: William Morrow. $10.00 (cloth); $4.85 (paper). (This book is about the congress held at Atlanta, Ga., in September 1970.)

Bennett, Jr., Lerone. THE CHALLENGE OF BLACKNESS. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co. 312 pages. $6.95. (A collection of essays and speeches on the Black people's thrust for political, economic and cultural power and how this thrust involves radical alternatives and strategies for the black community. Bennett, senior editor of Ebony magazine, is now director of Afro-American studies at Northwestern University. Other books by this prolific writer are Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, The Negro Mood, What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968, Confrontation: Black and White, Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction, 1867-1877 and Pioneers in Protest.)

Bearden, Romare and Harry Henderson. 6 BLACK MASTERS OF AMERICAN ART. New York: Doubleday/Zenith. 120 pages. $3.95 (cloth); $1.95 (paper). (A book for children about Joshua Johnston, Robert S. Duncanson, Henry O. Tanner, Horace Pippin, Augusta Savage and Jacob Lawrence. Another book for young people is Selden Rodman and Carole Cleaver's Horace Pippin: The Artist as a Black American [Doubleday], an adaptation of Rodman's early, 1947 

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RECENT BOOKS           KAISER

book on Pippin, the late primitive black painter, for adults. Bearden is the black painter who co-authored The Painter's Mind with Carl Holty.)

Birch, Herbert G. and Joan Dye Gussow. DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN: HEALTH, NUTRITION AND SOCIAL FAILURE. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Grune and Stratton. 322 pages. $10.00 (A scientific assessment of the terrible effects of poverty on the intellectual potential of children. Another refutation of Arthur R. Jensen's thesis that black disadvantaged, poor children fail educationally because their genes are inferior. Other books on this subject are Rodger Hurley's Poverty and Mental Retardation: A Causal Relationship and Nick Kotz's Let Them Eat Promises: The Politics of Hunger in America.)

Butcher, Margaret Just. THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN CULTURE. New York: A. A. Knopf. $7.95. (This is the second edition of a work based on the materials left by Alain Locke and first published in 1956. The book has long been out of print although the New American Library paperback seems to have been kept in print.)

Chapman, Abraham (editor). NEW BLACK VOICES. New York: New American Library. xxiv; 606 pages. $1.50 (paper). (Another book edited by Chapman is Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature, 1968.)"

Cleage, Jr., Albert B. BLACK CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM: NEW DIRECTIONS FOR THE BLACK CHURCH. New York: William Morrow. $8.95 (cloth); $3.45 (paper). (Rev. Cleage, the black author of The Black Messiah, believes that because the black church is the only American institution controlled by Black people, it is the only institution capable of liberating Blacks from oppression. But how? This argument will not hold water.)

Colter, Cyrus. THE RIVERS OF EROS. Chicago: Swallow Press. $6.95. (Colter, a black writer, is author of The Beach Umbrella, a book of short stories. This is his first novel-about Chicago's South Side. Paul Marttin's novel Cocoa Blades [Delacorte Press] is about a black girl figure skater.)

Cone, James H. THE SPIRITUALS AND THE BLUES: AN INTERPRETATION. New York: Seabury Press. $4.95 (cloth); $2.95 (paper). (Cone, a black writer, is author of A Black Theology of Liberation and Black Theology & Black Power. George Mitchell's Blow My Blues Away is about black Mississippi musicians.)

Davis, Angela Y. FRAME UP: THE OPENING DEFENSE STATEMENT MADE BY ANGELA Y. DAVIS, MARCH 29, 1972. National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, 2085 Sutter St., Suite 209, San Francisco, Calif. 94115. iv; 15 pages. $.25 (paper). (Other Angela Davis material is the book If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance by Angela Y. Davis and other political prisoners and the pamphlets Lectures on Liberation by Miss Davis, A Political Biography of Angela Davis [Calif. and N.Y. editions], On Trial: Angela Davis or America? by Ossie Davis, Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy et al., John Abt: On the Defense of Angela Davis and Free Angela Newsletter [Nov. 8, 1971].)

Deming, Richard. VIDA. New York: Lancer Books. 173 pages. $.95 (paper). (A

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