This is a new edition of the Choice Academic Title Award-winning volume first published by Facts on File in 2003. Critics are right to point out that it is somewhat overdue but it is an extremely timely and useful tool for helping us put into context the social and political unrest currently going on in America and the rest of the world. ( )

History by itself is not my biggest turn on when it comes to reading but I like biographies. I especially like the ones about people who survive all kinds of personal and social injustice and then make it big anyway. That’s why this is one of my favorite books, for the stories it tells about people who had everything going against them, mostly just because of the color of their skin, but managed to shine anyway… even if some of them did have to die first. Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and hundreds more from the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age are not just profiled in the book… they live in these pages.

The first time I checked this book out was when a group of us open mic poets decided to put on a tribute to the Harlem Renaissance. We couldn’t do it without learning more about the people and the times. The encyclopedia gave us more than we bargained for. It brought to life the writers, the musicians, the lovers, the poets, the artists, the leaders, really everything and everybody. The way they lived from the heart and turned their struggles into straight-up winning situations is a major example of pure excellence in living.

M/S25

http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Renaissance-Library-American-History/dp/08160... ( )

&srhttp://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Renaissance-Library-American-History/dp/0816045402/ref=sr_1_1/103-6490892-5548649?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173931086=1-1 ( )