Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families - REVIEW

by Judith Giesberg

Drawing from an archive of nearly five thousand letters and advertisements, the riveting, dramatic story of formerly enslaved people who spent years searching for family members stolen away during slavery.

Of all the many horrors of slavery, the cruelest was the separation of families in slave auctions. Spouses and siblings were sold away from one other. Young children were separated from their mothers. Fathers were sent down river and never saw their families again.

As soon as slavery ended in 1865, family members began to search for one another, in some cases persisting until as late as the 1920s. They took out “information wanted” advertisements in newspapers and sent letters to the editor. Pastors in churches across the country read these advertisements from the pulpit, expanding the search to those who had never learned to read or who did not have access to newspapers. These documents demonstrate that even as most white Americans—and even some younger Black Americans, too—wanted to put slavery in the past, many former slaves, members of the “Freedom Generation,” continued for years, and even decades, to search for one another. These letters and advertisements are testaments to formerly enslaved people’s enduring love for the families they lost in slavery, yet they spent many years buried in the storage of local historical societies or on microfilm reels that time forgot.

Judith Giesberg draws on the archive that she founded—containing almost five thousand letters and advertisements placed by members of the Freedom Generation—to compile these stories in a narrative form for the first time. Her in-depth research turned up additional information about the writers, their families, and their enslavers. With this critical context, she recounts the moving stories of the people who placed the advertisements, the loved ones they tried to find, and the outcome of their quests to reunite.

This story underscores the cruelest horror of slavery—the forced breakup of families—and the resilience and determination of the formerly enslaved. Thoughtful, heart-wrenching, and illuminating, Last Seen finally gives this lesser-known aspect of slavery the attention it deserves.

Judith Giesberg is professor of history and Robert M. Birmingham chair in the humanities at Villanova University. She is the founder and director of the Last Seen archive, and the author of several books on Civil War history, including Army at Home, Emilie Davis’s Civil War, and Last Seen.

Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13: 978-1982174323

Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation - REVIEW

by Bennett Parten

A groundbreaking account of Sherman’s March to the Sea—the critical Civil War campaign that destroyed the Confederacy—told for the first time from the perspective of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who fled to the Union lines and transformed Sherman’s march into the biggest liberation event in American history.

In the fall of 1864, Gen. William T. Sherman led his army through Atlanta, Georgia, burning buildings of military significance—and ultimately most of the city—along the way. From Atlanta, they marched across the state to the most important city at the time: Savannah.

Mired in the deep of the South with no reliable supply lines, Sherman’s army had to live off the land and the provisions on the plantations they seized along the way. As the army marched to the east, plantation owners fled, but even before they did so, slaves self-emancipated to Union lines. By the time the army seized Savannah in December, as many as 20,000 enslaved people had attached themselves to Sherman’s army. They endured hardships, marching as much as twenty miles a day—often without food or shelter from the winter weather—and at times Union commanders discouraged and even prevented the self-emancipated from staying with the army. Racism was not confined to the Confederacy.

In Somewhere Toward Freedom, historian Bennett Parten brilliantly reframes this seminal episode in Civil War history. He not only helps us understand how Sherman’s March impacted the war, and what it meant to the enslaved, but also reveals how it laid the foundation for the fledging efforts of Reconstruction. When the war ended, Sherman and various government and private aid agencies seized plantation lands—particularly in the sea islands off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts—in order to resettle the newly emancipated. They were fed, housed, and in some instances, taught to read and write. This first real effort at Reconstruction was short-lived, however. As federal troops withdrew to the north, Confederate sympathizers and Southern landowners eventually brought about the downfall of this program.

Sherman’s march has remained controversial to this day. But as Parten reveals, it played a significant role in ending the Civil War, due in no small part to the efforts of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who became a part of it. In Somewhere Toward Freedom, this critical moment in American history has finally been given the attention it deserves.

Bennett Parten is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University whose area of expertise is the Civil War period. He is a native of Royston, Georgia, and completed his PhD in history at Yale University. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Zocalo Public Square, and The Civil War Monitor, among others. He currently lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13: 978-1668034682

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live - REVIEW

Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

by Paul Kix

From journalist Paul Kix, the riveting story, never before fully told, of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign―ten weeks that would shape the course of the Civil Rights Movement and the future of America.

It’s one of the iconic photographs of American history: A Black teenager, a policeman and his lunging German Shepherd. Birmingham, Alabama, May of 1963. In May of 2020, as reporter Paul Kix stared at a different photo–that of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd–he kept returning to the other photo taken half a century earlier, haunted by its echoes. What, Kix wondered, was the full legacy of the Birmingham photo? And of the campaign it stemmed from?

In You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live, Paul Kix takes the reader behind the scenes as he tells the story of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s pivotal 10 week campaign in 1963 to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. At the same time, he also provides a window into the minds of the four extraordinary men who led the campaign―Martin Luther King, Jr., Wyatt Walker, Fred Shuttlesworth, and James Bevel. With page-turning prose that read like a thriller, Kix’s book is the first to zero in on the ten weeks of Project C, as it was known―its specific history and its echoes sounding throughout our culture now. It’s about Where It All Began, for sure, but it’s also the key to understanding Where We Are Now and Where We Will Be. As the fight for equality continues on many fronts, Project C is crucial to our understanding of our own time and the impact that strategic activism can have.

Celadon Books
ISBN-13 978-1250378088

NORVEL: An American Hero – REVIEW

by Kenneth F. Conklin

NORVEL: An American Hero tells the incredible story of Virginia's first Black Olympic gold medalist at the Helsinki Olympic Games in 1952.

Norvel Lee is a man whose unwavering determination and courage allowed him to overcome obstacles and achieve greatness. Born in a time of racial discrimination. Norvel faced numerous challenges early in life. However, he refused to be defeated and used his intelligence and athletic abilities to propel himself towards success. As he grew into a young man, Norvel continued to face adversity but his commitment to his community, country, and family never waivered. His unprecedented achievements in business, sports, and military service makes him a true representation of the American dream. This inspiring and uplifting story of perseverance is a must-read for anyone in need of motivation and a reminder of the power of the human spirit.

Kenneth F. Conklin LLC
ISBN-13  978-1734480726

Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation - REVIEW

by Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, Craig Borowiak

Mapping the transformative effects of America’s urban solidarity economies.

Solidarity economies, characterized by diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support, have long played pivotal but largely invisible roles in fostering shared survival and envisioning alternatives to racial capitalism globally and in the United States. This book maps the thriving existence of these cooperative networks in three differently sized American cities, highlighting their commitment to cooperation, democracy, and inclusion and demonstrating the desire—and the pressing need—to establish alternative foundations for social and economic justice.

Collectively authored by four social scientists, Solidarity Cities analyzes the deeply entrenched racial and economic divides from which cooperative networks emerge as they work to provide unmet basic needs, including food security, affordable housing, access to fair credit, and employment opportunities. Examining entities such as community gardens, credit unions, cooperatives, and other forms of economic solidarity, the authors highlight how relatively small yet vital interventions into public life can expand into broader movements that help bolster the overall well-being of their surrounding communities.

Bringing together insights from geography, political economy, and political science with mapping and spatial analysis methodologies, surveys, and in-depth interviews, Solidarity Cities illuminates the extensive footprints of solidarity economies and the roles they play in communities. The authors show how these initiatives act as bulwarks against gentrification, exploitation, and economic exclusion, helping readers see them as part of the past, present, and future of more livable and just cities.

Maliha Safri is professor of economics at Drew University. Her writing has been published in Antipode, Signs, and Environmental Policy and Governance.

Marianna Pavlovskaya is professor of geography at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. She is coeditor of Rethinking Neoliberalism: Resisting the Disciplinary Regime.

Stephen Healy is associate professor of geography at Western Sydney University and coauthor of Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities (Minnesota, 2013).

Craig Borowiak is professor of political science at Haverford College and author of Accountability and Democracy: The Pitfalls and Promise of Popular Control.

Univ Of Minnesota Press
ISBN-13 978-1517916022

Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes - REVIEW

by Langston Hughes, Edited by Danez Smith

From Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, a stunning collection of early works written from 1921-1927 curated by award winning poet and National Book Award finalist, Danez Smith. Hanif Abdurraqib calls the collection of polished poems and raw, unfinished, works-in-progress, “a gift to any poet working at any stage of their life and career.”

Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was an eighteen-year-old on a train to Mexico City, seeking funds to pursue his passion. Beloved verses like “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” were written without formal training, often on the back of napkins and envelopes, and were inspired by the sights and sounds of Black working-class people he encountered in his early life. Blues in Stereo is a collection of select early works, all written before the age of twenty-five, in which we see Langston Hughes with fresh eyes. 

From the intimate pages of his handwritten journals, you will travel with Hughes outside of Harlem as he travels the world, celebrate love as a tool of liberation, and enjoy his musical verse poetry, including a play he cowrote with Duke Ellington with a full score. Blues in Stereo foreshadows a master poet that will go on to define literature for centuries to come. And by keeping his original, handwritten notations found in archival material, we get to witness a genius’s earliest thought process in real time. National Book Award-nominated poet Danez Smith offers their insight and notes on themes, challenges, and obsessions contained in Hughes’s early work.

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1901. Often called 'The People’s Poet,' he authored and edited over thirty works poetry, novels, plays, essays, and children’s books. He was a poetic innovator and a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and his writing promoted equality, condemned racism and injustice, and helped shape American literature and politics. He died on May 22, 1967, in New York City. 

Danez Smith (Curator) is the author of four poetry collections including Bluff, Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead. Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and has been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Danez lives in Minneapolis with their people.

Legacy Lit
ISBN-13 ‏ 978-1538768914

Chinua Achebe: Narrating Africa in Fictions and History - REVIEW

Edited by Toyin Falola

An imaginative, narratological reading of Chinua Achebe's novels, stories, poetry, and essays through a literary and historical framework.

Toyin Falola analyzes fictional and historical cartographies of Africa in Achebe's literary works to offer a critical representation of Africa's present and future. In particular, he focuses on the historical valuation of a full range of the writer's works – novels including Things Fall Apart, but also short stories, poems, and essays – as important materials that have contributed to the political events in Nigeria and, by extension, Africa.

The raw creativity found in Achebe's stories and his ability to tell the Nigerian story – precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial – have endeared him to many, including readers and those critical of him and his works. Chinua Achebe: Narrating Africa in Fictions and History analyzes all of the writer's works, dwelling on the Nigerian political context upon which many, if not all, of his narratives lie. As a result, it examines methodologies of narration and ideologies that allow his works to resonate with the imagination of Africa.

Toyin Falola is Professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. He is an Extraordinary Professor of Political Science, University of Pretoria. He has received over 30 lifetime career awards and 24 honorary doctorates.

Abimbola Adelakun is Assistant Professor in the Department of African/African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She is co-editor, with Toyin Falola, of Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora (2018). She is also the author of Under the Brown Rusted Roofs (2008) and writes a weekly column for PUNCH Newspapers.

Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN-13 979-8765118474

Half American: The Heroic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad - REVIEW

by Matthew F. Delmont

More than one million Black soldiers served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units while waging a dual battle against inequality in the very country for which they were laying down their lives. The stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the “Good War” fought by the “Greatest Generation.” And yet without their sacrifices, the United States could not have won the war.

Half American is World War II history as you’ve likely never read it before. In these pages are stories of Black military heroes and civil rights icons such as Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the leader of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, who fought to open the Air Force to Black pilots; Thurgood Marshall, the chief lawyer for the NAACP, who investigated and publicized violence against Black troops and veterans; poet Langston Hughes, who worked as a war correspondent for the Black press; Ella Baker, the civil rights leader who advocated on the home front for Black soldiers, veterans, and their families; and James G. Thompson, the twenty-six-year-old whose letter to a newspaper laying bare the hypocrisy of fighting against fascism abroad when racism still reigned at home set in motion the Double Victory campaign. Their bravery and patriotism in the face of unfathomable racism is both inspiring and galvanizing. An essential and meticulously researched retelling of the war, Half American honors the men and women who dared to fight not just for democracy abroad but for their dreams of a freer and more equal America.

Matthew F. Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. A Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights, he is the author of four books: Black Quotidian, Why Busing Failed, Making Roots, and The Nicest Kids in Town. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and several academic journals, and on NPR. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his BA from Harvard University and his MA and PhD from Brown University.

Viking
ISBN-13 978-1984880390

Death at the Sign of the Rook: A Jackson Brodie Book - REVIEW

by Kate Atkinson

Welcome to Rook Hall. The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed.

In his sleepy Yorkshire town, ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off boredom and malaise. His only case is the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But Jackson soon uncovers a string of unsolved art thefts that lead him down a dizzying spiral of disguise and deceit to Burton Makepeace, a formerly magnificent estate now partially converted into a hotel hosting Murder Mystery weekends.

As paying guests, impecunious aristocrats and old friends collide, we are treated to Atkinson’s most charming and fiendishly clever mystery yet, one that pays homage to the masters of the genre—from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to the modern era of Knives Out and Only Murders in the Building.

Doubleday
ISBN-13 978-0385547994

A Buddhist Grief Observed

Excerpt from A Buddhist Grief Observed
By Guy Newland

Aren't Buddhists supposed to have transcended grief? What were we expecting? Was the Buddha not clear enough? We just need to "let go." 

When I was a young instructor at Mary Washington College, a student paper shocked me by arguing that Vietnamese Buddhists do not mourn their dead family members because they know that they are going on to future lives. Giving this writer skillful guidance was my first big teaching challenge. 

Most of us would not think this way, but we may fall into subtler missteps. Having met some Dharma and engaged it, many come to feel that they have taken death and impermanence into account. 

We might have. But probably not. Like everyone else, Buddhists seldom die as they expect. We die in some other way, too soon or too late, in ways we never imagined. We die in fear, and sadness, and in disappointment. Death is what happens when we are making other plans. And if our lives are committed to service, we will die while we still have critical work to do. 

When Dainin Katagiri Roshi was dying of cancer, he told his frightened students, "I see you are watching me closely; you want to see how a Zen master dies. I'll show you." He kicked violently and screamed, "I don't want to die!" Then he looked at them: "I don't know how I will die . . . Remember, there is no right way." None of us know how we will face death. 

Let's not fool ourselves. Meditation on death and impermanence does not magically make us invulnerable or transhuman. Losing those we love hurts. When his daughter died of smallpox, Kobayashi Issa wrote: 

  The world of dew
  Is indeed a world of dew.
  And yet, and yet... 

Issa comments on his poem: 

  I knew that it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return and scattered blossoms are gone beyond recall. Yet try as I would, I could not, simply could not cut the binding cord of human love. 

The Buddha teaches that all that arises is ephemeral, vanishing like a drop of dew in the morning sun. And this is true. Issa cannot evade the full force of this fact; as a Buddhist, he has long known this well - or thought he had. Now this little girl's death hurts him bone-deep, cuts him to the core. To be utterly heart-wrecked and, at the same time, strangely grateful for some lost grace - this is what it will always mean to be a human who loves another mortal. 

So we may have unrealistic expectations about how well our practice has prepared us to die or to lose someone whom we love more than our own lives. We may feel worse than we had expected to feel. You are practicing, your spouse dies - and suddenly it seems as though someone clubbed you in the head. Your grief may be complicated by useless disappointment in yourself-or in the Dharma itself. 

One woman came to me in a difficult grief after losing a parent. She made a commitment to intensive religious practice with the belief that she had taken the prospect of losing her parent into account. When grief hit her hard, she was doubly tormented. Because she felt so bad about her parent's death, she felt like a failure as a Buddhist. 

Soko Morinaga tells a similar story. His friend Miss Okamoto was a dedicated Zen practitioner for decades, but as death approached she was terrified - and also profoundly ashamed of her terror. 

I did not find my wife's death at all surprising. I had a vague idea that she would outlive me, but I also knew that she expected to die first. I wasn't startled that she died. And yet: I was shocked; it was a physical shock. 

Shock does not have to involve surprise. It took me months to understand. It is like someone informing you that he is going to punch you in the head - and then punching you in the head. You're not surprised, but you do have a concussion. 

Shock and pain are not a personal failure. It is cruel to judge ourselves so harshly; it is unhelpful to blame ourselves for being human. 

Knowing the first noble truth does not exempt us from it. 

Excerpt from A Buddhist Grief Observed
By Guy Newland
wisdompubs.org/grief-observed

What Good is Zen

 

What good is Zen if it won’t help my dying friend?

What good is Zen if it can’t stop an oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico?

What good is Zen is I’m shot down in Afghanistan?

What good is Zen if I’m broke and living on orange peels?

What good is Zen in the windows of an abandoned house?

What good is Zen is all it means is a pebble on the beach?

What good is Zen if you imagine you’ve done nothing wrong?

 

Excerpt from Zen Master Poems by Dick Allen
wisdompubs.org/zen-master-poems

Not No, Non- a Buddhist meditation

What Is The Meaning of Nonself?

Everything that comes into being depends on everything else. Nothing arises by itself.

In Buddhism, we often talk about “no self.”  This is a difficult idea to grasp in English.  What we mean is that the self as we usually image it doesn’t really exist.  Just as the daffodil is made up of the nutrients it draws from the soil, the energy of sunlight, the water that helps it grow, and the bees that pollinate, so, too, we are made up of the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the ancestors who have come before us and made our lives possible.

But does this mean that because the daffodil is comprised of nondaffodil materials it isn’t a daffodil?  Of course not!  And likewise for each of us.

In Chinese the word for “no self” is wuwo, but wu does not mean “no” in Chinese.  It negates rather than defines.  It is indefinite.  It is not fixed or concrete.  Wu connotes fluidity, movement, even hope.

The realization of no self is not at all nihilistic.  It simply means that the self is something different from what we habitually assume it to be.

In Chan, emptiness is not nothingness.  And nothingness is not nothing.  We might say “nonthingness” instead.  No self might be better expressed as nonself.  Not no, non-.

What is the meaning of nonself?  Infinity.  The downward sweep of Songnian’s hand came out of the place from which each breath comes and goes.  Where each moment is born and vanishes.  A place of nongrasping where there is complete freedom and everything comes together naturally.  A lovely Chinese phrase, xing yun liu shui, expresses this.  It means clouds flowing across the sky, a stream running downhill in spring without hindrance or obstruction, fully functioning, free but still connected, as clouds are connected to the sky and rivers to the earth.

When we realize that, we don’t feel terror or despair.  On the contrary: to realize that, to live it, gives rise to a feeling of potential and possibility.  We are no longer bound to the stifling attachment to who we think we are.

Everything changes, including each one of us.  We get stuck because we limit ourselves.  We do not really open up and become intimate with the world around us.

Not no, non-

 

Excerpt from Chan Heart, Chan Mind – A Meditation on Serenity and Growth by Master Guojun
wisdompubs.org/chan-heart