Houston Baker

Houston Baker is a professor of English, African, and African-American studies at Duke University. His most recent book is Critical Memory and Turning South Again: Rethinking Modernism/Rereading Booker T (Duke University Press, $46).

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (Random House, $12). The Southern author’s tour de force, featuring one of the monumental protagonists of world fiction, Col. Thomas Sutpen, whose class resentment and ambition drive him to a disastrous series of moral choices not unlike the ethical missteps of King Lear.

The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1930 by James Anderson (University of North Carolina Press, $19). A powerfully argued history tracing the resolute Afro-American urge for an education frustrated by white Southern “educators” bent on the disenfranchisement and subordination of blacks in the name of “education.”

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Price of a Child by Lorene Cary (Random House, $14). An Afro-American masterpiece that follows the fortunes of a black woman slave who makes a successful bid for freedom, taking two of her children along. The rub? Her youngest must be left behind and enslaved.

A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story by Elaine Brown (Pantheon Books, $17). The former Black Panther details the party’s origins. The author is rigorous in her critique of the naive machismo that robbed its agenda of its most vigorous possibilities.

Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape by Charlotte Pierce-Baker (Norton, W.W. & Company Inc., $14). Pierce-Baker tells the horrifying story of how two black men terrorized her family and raped her in 1981. In search of “other voices,” she found a heroic, articulate community of black women survivors whose stories she narrates.

Black Boy (American Hunger)

Black Boy

American Hunger