Here are a few delectable dishes that can satisfy any literary appetite until the new year.
If you want to catch up on your reading over the holiday break, consider these selections from university presses and other publishers on some high-profile topics of academic interest. What the books have in common is accessible writing, combined with clear thinking that defies the common wisdom on some controversial subjects and makes them highly readable for study or pleasure.
Burying Don Imus: Anatomy of a Scapegoat by Dr. Michael Awkward, $24.95, University of Minnesota Press, August 2009, ISBN-10: 0816667411, ISBN-13: 978- 0816667413, pp. 232.
Who could forget the big uproar over radio/TV talk show host Don Imus and his ill-chosen remarks about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team? So, who thinks the flap was much ado about nothing? This book does not suggest that, but the author adds nuance and context to this racially/sexually charged episode.
Awkward, a professor of African-American literature and culture at the University of Michigan, urges us to step back and look at the “real” Don Imus, the political commentator and satirist more closely aligned with charitable and progressive aims than with any racist agenda. How did this person become, in a televised instant, the White man everyone loved to hate?
The author, a longtime viewer of the morning program Imus lost in the scuffle, offers theories and explanations, but more importantly, he asks us to reflect on why we so often allow passion to trump reason in similar, media-fueled race dramas. He argues that while knee-jerk outrage and public hangings over perceived racial sins is an understandable reaction to centuries of distrust and animus, they are not always conducive to rational thought and arrival at just solutions to the continuing assaults and inequities.
Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture) by Dr. Susan M. Reverby, $30. University of North Carolina Press, October 2009, ISBN-10: 080783310X, ISBN-13: 978-0807833100. Pp. 424.
