Inspiring Tomes to Brighten Your Homes

Reviews by Sharon L . Shervington

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Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African-American History

Written by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The latest effort from Henry Louis Gates arrives just in time to make the perfect Christmas gift. It is a coffee-table book, a history book, an art book, and much more. Ambitious in scope, it evenly matches text and images to give a sweeping view of the African American experience in America. It is a book of tragedies and of triumphs and is bound to stir both strong feelings and debate.

 

Much of what is in the book, at least many of the people, their
accomplishments, and many legal cases and other hallmarks, will be
familiar to any educated reader. Unfortunately, the accomplishments of
so many African Americans have been excluded and even erased from
American history and its mainstream manifestations, such as museums and
school textbooks; that disappearance of history will leave many
completely unfamiliar with much of what Mr. Gates writes about.

The
author, I think, can legitimately be called larger-than-life in terms
of his impact on our culture, whether it is through his online news
site, The Root, his vocal interpretations of race matters from his
Harvard perch, or articles like the celebrated one he wrote on Anatole
Broyard for The New Yorker (if you haven’t read this, look it up online:
it is a must-read).

His famous, and infamous, altercation with
Cambridge, MA police on his return home from China to find his door
jammed brought him even more into the public eye, as did his “beer
summit” on the White House lawn that followed. Gates’s life and work are
lessons for all of us, and Life Upon These Shores is an entertaining
global lesson plan that is still being written—one that we badly need.

Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African-American History 1513-2008; by Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Knopf; 497 pages.


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Untie the Strong Woman: Blessed Mother’s Love for the Wild Soul

Written by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD

If you or your friends are interested in the Sacred Feminine (or
even fairy tales), you may know Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run
with the Wolves, a volume that is still deeply popular in many circles
today, including college campuses. In this, her first work in some
years, Dr. Pinkola Estes touches on many of the themes that she examined
so soulfully and with such insight and erudition in her previous book.

Like
Dr. Gates, Dr. Pinkola Estes focuses on a theme that functions as the
source, the essence of her life work: that the denigration of female
power and strength has harmed individuals and the world. This book is
more grounded, and many of its stories are practical ones, unlike the
legends and myths that are at the core of “Wolves.”

Whether
reading of her experiences with attempting to heal incarcerated women,
the pope’s role in Africa, or the realities of fallen Communist regimes,
readers will find techniques and methods to become more closely
connected to the Sacred Mother in their lives and to help heal lingering
soul wounds. What gift can be better than that?

Untie the Strong Woman: Blessed Mother’s Love for the Wild Soul; by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Sounds True; 374 pages.