The Damned, L.A. Banks, St. Martin’s Griffin, ISBN # 0-312-33624-1, $14.95.
Lilith, the consort of the Unnamed One, has released The Damned, tortured souls from all levels of Hell, to walk the Earth, taking the form of a deadly contagion. One brief touch from these deadly creatures can affect any human, driving them to madness, death, or even worst. This time, Damali, Carlos, and the Guardians cannot effectively close ranks. The infection has spread to key team members and threatens to wipe out the entire squad. Even The Covenant has been infected. The only antidote is to behead Lilith. But first, they must find her. The sixth entry in L.A. Banks Vampire Huntress Series, The Damned, is edgier than any of the previous installments. A controversial, cutting-edge urban legend that goes beyond the traditional vampire tale, it runs in your blood.

Kiss the Year Goodbye, Brenda L. Thomas, Tu-Shonda L. Whitaker, Crystal Lacey Winslow, and Daaimah S. Poole, Pocket Books, ISBN #: 0-7434-9707-4, $14.
New Year’s Eve is when lines between old and new blur, when fantasies become reality, and when every woman has the opportunity to reinvent herself. In “Every New Year,” a shoot-out lands a respected doctor in the hospital with a bad case of amnesia, and in the care of a man too sexy to resist. In “Whatever It Takes,” a sassy older woman tries to break off her steamy relationship with her best friend’s twenty-three-year-old son, but he shows he’s man enough to fulfill her needs. In “Dangerously in Love,” a prim and proper young woman’s wild side takes over after the man she’s dating slips up with another woman. In “My Boo,” a Philly girl’s long distance boyfriend never has the time for her, so when her ex-roommate’s latest lover comes knocking, she’s ready to get the party started. Join the fearless, fun-loving women in this sizzling collection as they bring in the New Year with a bang, shedding inhibitions and embarking on exhilarating nighttime escapades.

Stripped Bare: The 12 Truths That Will Help You Land the Very Best Black Man, LaDawn Black, Ballantine, ISBN # 0-345-48366-9, $12.95.
Tired of hearing the lie that good Black love is an impossibility? If so, it’s time to get stripped. Leave the blame and the baggage behind. This take-charge manifesto shows you how to be the kind of person who’ll attract the men that you deserve. Armed with twelve proven truths, you’ll challenge self-defeating ways of thinking and living and position yourself for enduring love. Filled with personal anecdotes and practical advice, this wise and candid guide can help every woman break the cycle of dead-end relationships and embrace the sexy and loving man who is just within reach. Stripped Bare provides the tools every woman can use, and the directions for how to use them to the greatest romantic advantage.

Don’t Want No Sugar, J.D. Mason, St. Martin’s Griffin, ISBN # 0-312-34899-1, $13.95
Everyone knew that Eula May had lost her mind over loving a married man. It was what drove her to kill herself and leave her only daughter in the care of the local midwife. So it was no wonder when Roberta became obsessed with Charles Harris the very first time she laid eyes on him. She was even willing to commit murder to have him. And when he is forced to marry her because of her unexpected pregnancy, Roberta feels that she has everything she ever wanted. Women have always come easy for Charles, but he’s wondering how he ever got saddled with a wife he doesn’t love, two children, and a longing for something grander. Then he meets stunning Sara Tate and discovers a love almost as consuming as the one Roberta feels for him. This deadly love triangle results in deception and murder, leaving a legacy for generations to come.

I Know I’ve Been Changed, ReShonda Tate Billingsley, Pocket Books, ISBN # 1-4165-1197-0, $14.
Raedella Rollins left the dusty town of Sweet Poke, Ark. on a Texas-bound bus with four mismatched suitcases, a newsroom job offer, and a promise to herself; never look back. Now, less than a decade later, she’s a top-rated talk show host, a celebrity news anchor and fiancée to Houston’s star councilman. The future looks bright for Rae, and Sweet Poke is nothing more than a distant memory. But now that she’s reached the top, her ragtag family suddenly comes knocking. Mama Tee, the grandmother who raised her, calls with unwelcome family updates, and Shondella, her jealous older sister, guilts her into sending money. To Rae, nothing could be worst than an unexpected reunion with her over-the-top relatives. But when her picture- perfect life comes crashing down around her, Rae’s family calls her back to Sweet Poke and to the life she left behind. Can Rae let go of the pain of her childhood and open her heart to the healing that only faith and family can provide?

Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out, Edited by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin, and Kenyon Farrow, Nation Books, ISBN # 1-56025-747-4, $14.95.
Letters from Young Activists is a collection of voices from across the country writing from the heart on some of the most pressing political issues of today. Offering a glimpse inside the minds of today’s generation proves once and for all that young people are as engaged as ever. From Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror to Hip-hop and punk-rock, activists are engaging today’s political, social, and cultural issues that matter most to them. The twenty-first century rebels and agitators whose voices are gathered here illustrate the adage that “the personal is political,” as they engage allies and critics alike about what it means to be an activist.

Every Sistah Wants It, Victor McGlothin, St. Martin’s Griffin, ISBN # 0-312-34877-0, $13.95.
Octavia Longbow is a show producer at Hot 100, Dallas’s top R&B radio station, and she wants what every sistah wants. But she leads a complicated life. In addition to her career ambitions, she has an international hip-hop star for an ex-boyfriend, a handsome new man without a penny to his name, and a group of strong-willed overly opinionated girlfriends all up in her business. However, she also has a genius for revenge. When her ex-boyfriend tries to wheedle his way back into her life, promising that this time it isn’t just a booty call, she has some serious thinking to do. He may be one of the sexiest men on the planet, but it doesn’t mean he knows what love really is. And that new man leaves her heart jumping in her chest. What’s a sistah to do? Is it out with the old, in with the new, for good?

The Wings That Fly Us Home: A Novel, Dayna Dunbar, Ballantine Books, ISBN # 0-345-46043-X, $13.95.
Aletta Honor’s psychic gift for reading people’s futures seems to have vanished overnight. It seems curious that the disappearance coincided with the mysterious visit from a Native American who came bearing an eagle feather and a cryptic message. Then there’s the cousin she never knew she had who suddenly appears at her doorstep and shares a shocking secret about their family. One thing’s for sure: Aletta is poised for a change. Her no-good, alcoholic ex-husband is stirring up trouble, a new lover turns out to be bad news, and she can’t bear another day of fake-foretelling to unsuspecting customers. So with some kooky friends, she sets off for the southwest where she finally comes to understand her special talent and the real meaning of life…specifically her own.

I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You: Aretha Franklin, Respect, and the Making of a Soul Music Masterpiece, Matt Dobkin, St. Martin’s Griffin, ISBN # 0-312-31829-4, $14.95.
Aretha Franklin’s first album for Atlantic Records and famed producer Jerry Wexler, was a pop and soul music milestone that jump-started Franklin’s languishing career. Almost overnight, Aretha became a top-selling recording artist and a cultural icon. Matt Dobkin has unearthed fascinating details about the recording session in Muscle Shoals, Alabama; about the volatile behavior of Aretha’s manager/husband, Ted White; about Aretha’s reaction to the lack of Black musicians in the session; and about how tempers and alcohol almost derailed the session with only a track and a half in the can. The first serious, nonbiographical look at Aretha Franklin’s work, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You will deepen even ardent fans’ understanding of one of the great soul artists of our time.

When a Sistah’s Fed Up, Monica Frazier Anderson, AuthorHouse, ISBN # 1-4208-4895-X, $18.95.
She’s the first African-American mayor of Ulysses, Texas. She’s married to her college sweetheart, and she has two “almost” perfect children. So why is she unhappy? And who attempted to kill her? Is it her jealous husband, Preston, who wants her at home full-time? Her vicious political rival, J.D. Person?  Or is it the irate citizen who threatens her at every council meeting?  When a dark secret from the mayor’s past is revealed during her campaign for re-election, she drops in the polls and falls into the arms of Raymond Hart, her charming administrative assistant. She’s weary of dogooding, and tired of being taken for granted, but wrong is wrong. Right?

Brass Ankle Blues: A Novel, Rachal Harper, Touchstone, ISBN # 0-7432-7680-9, $23.
As a young woman of mixed race, Nellie Kincaid is about to encounter the strange, unsettling summer of her fifteenth year. Reeling from the recent separation of her parents, Nellie finds herself traveling to the family’s lake house with only her father and her estranged cousin, leaving behind the life and the mother she is trying to forget. Now, as she navigates the twists and turns of first love and shifting family loyalties, what has always been a warm, carefree time is suddenly filled with new tensions. As the summer progresses, Nellie moves toward a definition of self that encompasses all the aspects of her paradoxical--yet truly American--identity, only to find her family growing more divided with each passing day.

Street Chronicles: Tales from Da Hood, Nikki Turner, Ballantine Books, ISBN # 0-345-48401-0, $13.95.
Essence magazine’s #1 bestselling author Nikki Turner lends her considerable street cred to this anthology, the first of its kind, an explosive collection featuring edgy new writers handpicked for their ability to evoke the street and the people who live by its rules, in hot, hyperrealistic stories. Turner scoured the ghetto, the prisons, and every crack and crevice around the country to bring you these impressive new fresh-from-the-street voices. Turner even throws in a raw gangsta tale of her own. From a buppie who risks her entire well-groomed world when she’s suddenly turned on by a thug (“Gotta Have a Ruffneck”), to a lesbian pimp who gets what she deserves from the women she’s turning out (“Big Daddy”), these stories will shock, entertain, and make you fly through the pages.

Enrique’s Journey, Sonia Nazario, Random House, ISBN # 1-4000-6205-5, $26.95.
In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States. Without money, he will travel the only way he can: clinging to the tops and sides of freight trains. Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerta--The Train of Death. It is an epic journey thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States.

God of Our Single Years, Kevin Morgan, Authorhouse, ISBN # 142080054X, $19.95.
Full of keen insights and helpful suggestions, this well-written book examines how African American Christian singles can apply concepts such as love, faith, service, patience, humility and forgiveness in their everyday activities. By implementing the author’s suggestions, readers will become empowered to get the most out of their singleness as it relates to their platonic relationships, romantic encounters, family and career-related interactions as well as in the proper expression of their sexuality. With the use of timely quotes from notable African Americans, relevant statistics, and Biblical wisdom, the author endeavors to uplift singles so they can position themselves to “transform their singleness into blessedness.”

Book Reviews by Kam Williams
Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, biography, Lerone Bennett, Jr., Johnson Publishing Company, ISBN: 0-87485-085-1, Hardcover, $35, 652 pages.
 “I will say then, that I am not, nor have ever been, in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races…”
 – Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln has long been the most revered of American Presidents. Though fondly remembered as “The Great Emancipator,” he was the beneficiary of innumerable tall tales spun to shield the populace from the awful truth that he was an avowed racist.  Unfortunately, the chroniclers of history, perhaps intimidated by the uncritically euphoric shadow cast by the Lincoln legend, have heretofore avoided attempting to assess the man honestly and objectively from a proper perspective. 
Back in 1968 noted historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., author of Before the Mayflower, published a controversial article entitled, “Was Abraham Lincoln a White Supremacist?”  Most Americans, Black and white, were aghast at even the suggestion of such a flaw in a demigod whose image had become synonymous with freedom and racial quality.  In response to the furor created by his article, Mr. Bennett quietly embarked on over three decades of painstaking, scholarly research, closely examining the words and deeds of our 16th President.
Forced into Glory represents the fruit of Bennett’s labors, and this 652 page biography sets the record straight, exposing the real Abe Lincoln, wart and all. Virtually every myth gets exploded along the way, as the author uncovers his subject as an insensitive bigot who, for instance, advocated peace while waging a war of ethnic cleansing on Native Americans.
The reader also learns that ‘Honest’ Abe was an inveterate, credit-taking prevaricator who actually enslaved far more Blacks than he ever freed. It was the 13th Amendment, not the politically expedient Emancipation Proclamation, which actually ended the institution of slavery once and for all. In fact, a remorseful Lincoln himself had labored to limit the scope of his famous decree immediately in the wake of its implementation.                    
While Lincoln is remembered for having come from humble, log cabin roots, Bennett further informs us that as a young lawyer he had married Mary Todd, an aristocrat who hailed from a family of filthy rich slave owners.
You might be surprised to know that when Lincoln inherited slaves from his father-in-law, he didn’t even consider emancipating them, but rather condemned them further to a life of misery. Yep, he and his wife cashed in on the inheritance by putting their African Americans up for auction to the highest bidders, utterly unconcerned about the effects of the ensuing separation on their families and friends. Does that sound like the behavior of a "Great Emancipator"?
Bennett’s essential thrust is that Lincoln was an oppressor who went out of his way to endorse slavery, including his enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. More precisely, he was a conservative during conditions of clearly intense exploitation. And the book makes a strong case that to be conservative at a time of such extreme oppression is to be an accomplice, especially in the face of a vociferous abolitionist movement.
To some, it may seem tragic that Forced into Glory knocks a national icon off his pedestal. Perhaps more significantly, it exposes the duplicitous nature of a national philosophy which has made a habit of extreme disassociation between its words and its deeds. Thus, this clarifying opus emphasizes the point that only by owning up to its disgraceful legacy, including Lincoln, can America ever have a chance of eradicating its seemingly indelible stain which started with slavery and still saturates the country’s subconscious.   

Out of Bounds: Coming Out of Sexual Abuse, Addiction, and My Life of Lies in the NFL Closet, autobiography, Roy Simmons and Damon DiMarco in collaboration with David Fisher and Jimmy Hester, Carroll & Graf, ISBN: 0-7867-1681-9, Hardcover, $25, 288 pages.
“There was this constant worry in the back of my head about being found out for liking men. I’d venture to say that the stigma of homosexuality among young black men is three or four times greater than it is for young white men.
Because I was a football player, folks just naturally assumed I was straight… I was living a closeted life in my own little closeted world.
Nobody knew. I doubt anybody even suspected.”    
– Excerpted from Chapter Five

Roy Simmons played in the NFL for seven years, enjoying an enviable career which began with the New York Giants and peaked in 1984 when he was one of the famed “Hogs” on the offensive line of a Washington Redskins team that went to the Superbowl. At one point, Roy seemed to have it all. Not only fame and fortune, but he was expecting a newborn baby with his fiancée, Sheila, the childhood sweetheart he called “the love of my life.”
Unfortunately, the two never married. In fact, he abandoned his daughter entirely, leaving his ex to raise the little girl alone. Not only had Roy been shamelessly two-timing Sheila with other women, but he was also very busy on the down-low, compulsively seeking out secret liaisons with homosexuals in parks, gay bars, bathhouses, men’s room stalls, anywhere, anytime it didn’t conflict with his gridiron schedule.
In addition, Roy had a pretty awesome narcotics habit, over-imbibing in everything from alcohol to amyl nitrite to weed to coke to crack. So, it’s not surprising that before time he bottomed out, he found himself broke and out of football, homeless, on food stamps and shoplifting, stabbing a drug dealer, and dressing in drag to satisfy strangers at $20 a pop as a male hooker.
What Roy didn’t know till it was too late to apologize to his innumerable, unprotected sex partners was that he was HIV positive and spreading a lot more than love. Anyhow, this Prodigal Prostitute has apparently finally found God, and just as importantly, a book agent, and a trio of ghost writers. And if you’re interested in the sordid details of what Roy’s life in the closet was like, you ought to read Out of Bounds, a memoir which is, quite frankly, a strikingly graphic and unapologetic memoir.
While his co-authors might really be the ones responsible for the autobiography’s frank tone, it is only Simmons himself who emerges as unsympathetic at the end of this explicit recounting of his self-destructive road to Hell and back. Sad that the first openly-HIV NFL star would have to be a guy that’s so unlikable, his recently being born again notwithstanding.

Defying the Odds: Triumphant Black Women of Newark, biography, Barbara J. Kukla, Swing City Press, ISBN: 0-9768130-0-9, Hardcover, $28, 280 pages, illus.    
Whether the threat is a burning cross in a sleepy Southern town, or a female doctor bucking the whites-only hiring policies of a city hospital, Defying the Odds: Triumphant Black Women of Newark speaks to the remarkable fortitude of women everywhere who struggle against the everyday realities of racial bigotry and sexual discrimination.
My purpose in writing this book is tied to my belief that too little attention has been paid to contributions made to our society by the men and women brought here in shackles to fuel our nation’s early economy. [It] focuses on the contributions of eight African-American women… [and] includes profiles of more than two hundred additional black women of Newark who reached the top of their fields.
Considered as a whole, the accomplishments of these trailblazers paint a powerful picture of what African American women can achieve, against the odds, in their quest for excellence. Their stories can help new generations of young black women gain strength and inspiration from a broader perspective on the challenges of being black and female.
– Excerpted from the Introduction

Do the names Connie Woodruff or Gladys St. John ring a bell? How about
Dr. E. Alma Flagg or Dr. E. Mae McCarroll? Or Viola Wells, Wynona M. Lipman, Mary Beasley Burch or Marion A. Bolden? Likely not, though each of these Black trailblazers from Newark, New Jersey made significant contributions in their chosen fields of endeavor. And luckily, their legacy has now been fittingly preserved by Barbara J. Kukla in Defying the Odds.
Kukla, who served as editor of "Newark This Week" during most of her 36-year tenure at the Newark Star-Ledger, was intimately involved with many of the folks found here. For besides her professional ties to the community, she is a longtime member of the city’s Bethany Baptist Church.
The author is a gifted writer who has crafted each entry in a straightforward, journalistic style tempered by an ability to serve up a bio in a way which makes each subject come alive and practically leap off the pages. For example, we get treated to an excellent sense of the personality of Connie Williams Woodruff (1921-1996), to whom the book is dedicated. We learn that Connie was an only child who could play classical music by the age of six.
She was a stellar student and was invited to Washington, DC one summer to participate in a six-week institute sponsored by the Republican Party. Besides learning about government, she would suffer severe humiliation as the only Black participant in the program.
Particularly poignant is how her chapter recounts the discrimination she encountered in the Capitol area. One incident occurred at a Chinese restaurant where she was refused service as soon as she entered by an Asian-American waitress who screamed “No niggy! No niggy! No niggy!” in pidgin-English.
On top of that insult, Connie was informed that she couldn’t stay at the hotel with the rest of the delegates, but had to find boarding on the Black side of town. Despite, or perhaps because of these impediments, she managed to maintain her dignity and forge a determination which would lead to many years of dedicated service to the people as a labor leader, educator, and the editor of a Black newspaper.
The other seven biographies contained in this informative opus are just as gripping, as are the mini-histories of the additional two hundred doctors, lawyers, businesswomen, athletes, politicians, entertainers and other African American women from all walks of life who made enough of a mark to earn the right to be remembered as a favorite daughter of the City of Newark.