The spirit of Harlem

The Washington Post

From the same team who produced the bestselling Crowns (a surprisingly successful photographic study of black women in church hats published in 2000) comes this fascinating survey of intriguing Harlemites. — Jabari Asim

Publishers Weekly

The duo responsible for Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats pay homage to a grand and quickly changing neighborhood. Local teachers, doctors, lawyers and journalists tell their own stories, as do artists, musicians, hatmakers, dry cleaners, literary agents, fencers, barbers, chess players and street vendors, illustrated by 52 on-site portraits. While the photos are largely conventional, many of the personal histories deserve their own books. Brett Cook-Dizney, a graffiti artist, briefly explains the "apprenticeship structure" of graffiti, "where someone usually shows you technique and style and then you fill in their lines for a while." Sy Oumoukoulshome, a hair braider, relates the honored place that braiders hold in her home country. "It's a tradition that some families in Senegal specialize in doing braids. They call them griots. It goes from generation to generation.... In Senegal, hair braiders have respect from people. But not in Harlem." The sequencing of stories and portraits is thoughtfully done. In one sequence, Kevin Taylor, the producer of Black Entertainment Television, precedes Robert Garland, a choreographer at Dance Theatre of Harlem, followed by Noah Stewart, who broke tradition by singing a spiritual at his Juilliard audition. He is in turn followed by Alice McClarty, a singer for the Sounds of Glory Choir, who herself precedes saxophonist Lonnie Youngblood. (Nov. 18) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Both of these titles explore the black experience in America, one in the particular locale of Harlem, the other on some of the 600 American streets named for Martin Luther King Jr. Wonderful photos and a generous, open-hearted narrative are integral to each book. Harlem is based on 50 two-page interviews, with photos of people ages 15 to 96 that reveal their perceptions, hopes, and understanding of the world and their neighborhood. A choreographer finds Harlem "the dance capital of the world for a long time." An art dealer remembers learning to play "Black ball you had to be willing to get knocked around" by Harlem Globetrotters at the Riverton projects. Others depicted include an Olympic fencer, a TV producer, a Schomburg tour guide, and a poet. The author and photographer previously collaborated on another wonderful title of smaller scope: Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats. Award-winning journalist Tilove and Falco, a commercial photographer, have created an episodic view as they careered for two years in search of streets named after Martin Luther King, including 125th Street in Harlem, first for a newspaper series and then for this book. The tour starts in Belle Glade, FL (pop. 15,000), whose high school has produced 21 pro athletes and, during the 1980s, the world's highest rate of AIDS. Succeeding chapters take in King's Atlanta; Selma, where MLK intersects with Jeff Davis Street; Dallas, Galveston, Jasper, and other Texas towns; Chicago; Oakland; and more. In place after place, MLK streets "lay bare the racial fault lines"; they are places where "white America seldom goes and Black America can be itself." We meet people striving to create a black nation, sponsoring a Black History competition and the Algebra Project, and creating Afrocentric schools. There are ministers, funeral directors, journalists, professors, poets, politicians, and artists, all living their lives in the vicinity of streets named for Martin Luther King Jr. There are ordinary people and people like poet Haki Madhubuti, influential in black America but invisible elsewhere. This book serves as a testament that the dream still lives. Buy both titles for every public library and for African American, social history, and local history collections.-Janice Dunham, John Jay Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.