Kirkus calls it a “sui generis and essential work on Black music culture.” Best of all, there’s a Spotify playlist to accompany it. This is heady stuff from a professor of African American studies at Yale-densely academic in places yet always animated by sharp insights about Black music and Black feminism. Among the artists discussed here: Ma Rainey, Nina Simone, Eartha Kitt, Odetta, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Lauryn Hill, and Beyoncé along with writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, and jazz historian Rosetta Reitz. Brooks’ exciting critical study Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Belknap/Harvard Univ., Feb.
I am tired of us not being recognized, I am tired of being erased.” In shining a spotlight on these three figures, Tubbs offers what our reviewer calls a “refreshing, well-researched contribution to Black women’s history.”īlack women in music-and the Black women critics who wrote about their work-are the subject of Daphne A. Author Anna Malaika Tubbs writes, with evident passion, “I am tired of Black women being hidden.
Now Louise Little shares the spotlight with Alberta King and Berdis Baldwin in The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation (Flatiron Books, Feb. This book, which our reviewer calls a “riveting dual biography…that reads like a work of historical fiction,” sheds light on these trailblazers while rendering them as complicated, three-dimensional figures.Īmong the many revelations of last year’s National Book Award–winning biography of Malcolm X, The Dead Are Arising, were the political beliefs and activism of Malcolm’s parents and their role in shaping his own. 19) recounts the story of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to receive a medical degree (1849) and later the founder, with sister Emily (also a doctor), of the first hospital staffed exclusively by women. Nimura’s The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine (Norton, Jan.
Here are four especially noteworthy titles: (It was preceded, from 1982 to 1986, by Women’s History Week-enough said.) It’s a worthwhile prod for schools and libraries-and magazines like this one-to devote more time to women in history, but the idea that the subject deserves just one month of the year is, frankly, inadequate.įortunately, 2021 is already brimming with excellent books about women’s lives, work, and influence. Women’s History Month was established in 1987 to draw more attention to the subject. Girls may “run the world,” as Beyoncé so memorably put it, but all too often they do so behind the scenes women’s accomplishments still don’t get the attention they deserve in the book world or any other quarter of the media.
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