Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr by Michael Vinson Williams

 

Hello my lovely readers! Finally making headway on the 12 Lives Challenge. This is my fifth biography!

SYNOPSIS

Civil rights activist Medgar Wiley Evers was well aware of the dangers he would face when he challenged the status quo in Mississippi in the 1950s and '60s, a place and time known for the brutal murders of Emmett Till, Reverend George Lee, Lamar Smith, and others. Nonetheless, Evers consistently investigated the rapes, murders, beatings, and lynching's of black Mississippians and reported the horrid incidents to a national audience, all the while organizing economic boycotts, sit-ins, and street protests in Jackson as the NAACP's first full-time Mississippi field secretary. He organized and participated in voting drives and nonviolent direct-action protests, joined lawsuits to overturn state-supported school segregation, and devoted himself to a career that cost him his life.

This biography of a lesser-known but seminal civil rights leader draws on personal interviews from Myrlie Evers-Williams (Evers's widow), his two remaining siblings, friends, grade-school-to-college schoolmates, and fellow activists to elucidate Evers as an individual, leader, husband, brother, and father. Extensive archival work in the Evers Papers, the NAACP Papers, oral history collections, FBI files, Citizen Council collections, and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers, to list a few, provides a detailed account of Evers's NAACP work and a clearer understanding of the racist environment that ultimately led to his murder.

Selfless dedication marked the life of Medgar Evers, and while this remains his story, it is also a testament to the important role that grassroots activism played in exacting social change during some of America's most turbulent and violent times.

Mazywood by Tananarive Due

Hello my lovely readers!

SYNOPSIS
When Johnny—a filmmaker and grandson of the famous Black actress Mazelle Washington—brings his family to Mazywood, the secluded California mountain lodge left behind by his grandmother, he expects a quiet retreat. Instead, he uncovers a legacy of rage, secrets, and terror that has haunted his family for generations.

Set primarily in the present day, with haunting flashbacks to Hollywood’s Golden Age, Mazywood explores three generations while following Johnny as he pieces together the true story of his grandmother. As a young Black actress whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1940s, Mazelle brushed shoulders with giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel. But beneath her public appearance, she carried a secret she had kept and nurtured since she was a child, when a dark wish came true and changed the course of her life forever.

Now, fifty years after Mazelle’s death, Johnny finds himself confronting the truth she buried—and the consequences she left behind. For a monster lurks outside Mazywood, hidden for generations, and Johnny brought his family to its hunting grounds.

Taming it Down by Kim McLarin

 

Hello my lovely readers! This is my fourth book of the Personal Five Challenge and what a trip down memory lane! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
The daughter of an ambitious mother and the product of an exclusive New England prep school, African-American journalist Hope Robinson is sick of proving herself over and over to white professionals...tired of the automatic distrust she gets from the black community...and has had it up to here with black -- and white -- men who don't think she's good enough. It will take both a crisis and a journey back into the worlds Hope grew up in before she can confront the roots of her rage -- and finally free herself to be who she wants to be.

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad

 

Hello my lovely readers! I'm so glad I found the time to read this book! I'd picked it up back in May but it was due before I could delve into it. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the wooded island of Ut ya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Asne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and its reverberations. How did Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become Europe's most reviled terrorist? How did he accomplish an astonishing one-man murder spree? And how did a famously peaceful and prosperous country cope with the slaughter of so many of its young?

This is Me: A Reckoning by Hayden Panettiere

 

Hello my lovely readers! First things first, R.I.P. Hayden. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
Hayden Panettiere’s career in entertainment began before she could talk. From her first gig as a Michelin baby to roles in cult classics like Remember the Titans and Raising Helen, as well as popular soap operas Guiding Light and One Life to Live, Hayden built an impressive resume by the time she entered middle school. Throughout the early 2000s, she starred in millennial favorites like Racing Stripes, Heroes, and Scream 4 & VI and earned two Golden Globe nominations for her starring role of Juliette Barnes in Nashville. The squeaky-clean face of Neutrogena, she was Hollywood’s girl next door and subjected to all the fame, attention, and expectations that came with it. In an era of relentless paparazzi with an appetite for celebrity breakdowns, naysayers were certain this young starlet would crash and burn. Not one to disappoint, she did.

In this irreverent, intimate, and inspiring memoir, Hayden holds nothing back. What started as a fun job for a child took a decidedly darker turn as she came of age. She exposes the pressure and exploitation young stars face before they’re old enough to know themselves, and how easy it is for them to lose control of their own narrative and, ultimately, their lives. Hayden was the target of brutal tabloid headlines picking apart her body, and she performed storylines onscreen that mirrored her real-life trauma. She suffered post-partum depression, addiction and recovery, domestic abuse, and the loss of her beloved little brother. Despite everything, Hayden managed to take these experiences, which she calls “lifequakes,” and emerge from them stronger, no longer afraid to use her voice or show her true self. She’s played the part of a misfit hero, a superstar, a survivor, a cheerleader, and an all-American fresh face. In THIS IS ME, Hayden stars in her most heart-wrenching and unforgettable role yet: herself. This is her story, on her terms.

QUICK REVIEWS pt. XIV

 Hello my lovely readers!

After a slowwwww August, I've been reading, reading, reading! Here's some quick reviews (already!) Let's get into it.

Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers and their Children since WWII by Daniel Rivers
Beginning in the postwar era, a period marked by both intense repression and dynamic change for lesbians and gay men, Rivers argues that by forging new kinds of family and childrearing relations, gay and lesbian parents have successfully challenged legal and cultural definitions of family as heterosexual.

*This was super informative and opened by eyes to a part of U.S. history that I knew nothing about. I do wish that it followed a few families all the way through from the initial coming out to where they and their children are now. 3 out of 5 stars.

Just to Be With You by Sheryl Lister
Terrence "Monte" Campbell has been hurt by women seeking his wealth and celebrity instead of the man he truly is. So music is his only passion, until he meets Janae. He struggles to maintain emotional distance, but her tender sensuality and caring ways tempt Terrence as no other before. And one sizzling night, they both give in to their desires and explore all of the erotic promises between them. Is Janae really the one for Terrence, or just another disappointment waiting to happen?

*This book was a complete waste of my time. Thank goodness I finished it quickly! It was repetitive, had no buildup, the pace was incredibly rushed and the characters all sounded the same. 2 out of 5 stars.

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

 

Hello my lovely readers! After a rough August, I'm finally coming out of the fog and reading more! Funny that even in a "low" reading month, I was still able to get through eight books LOL Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.

Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.