By Jo Manby
Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was in my opinion, and that of many others across the world, one of the greatest writers in the English language. This post presents a timeline of this extraordinary woman’s life.
By Jo Manby
Crisis Music: The cultural politics of Rock Against Racism by Ian Goodyer. Manchester University Press: 2009
(Local Classification: AR.8.00/GOO)
November 1976. Rock Against Racism (RAR) holds its first gig in the Princess Alice pub in the East End of London. Young people are rallying against the far-right National Front.
Two years later, April 1978. Victoria Park in the East End of London. A huge crowd gathers for a day-long outdoor concert headlined by Tom Robinson and The Clash. It was this concert, organised by Rock Against Racism, that helped to radicalise a generation and gave punk a reason to be something more than rebellious nihilism.
A review from our book reviewer Jo, this time from her own blog Floralia (which is well worth following!).
My Name Is Leon is a beautifully written story of mixed race fostering and adoption, set in 1981; a year of heightened tension between Britain’s black communities and the police, that led to uprisings in Toxteth, Handsworth and a number of other cities, including Manchester’s Moss Side. Fascinating to read this moment in history through young Leon’s eyes.
This book isn’t in our collection, but is available at most of the Manchester Libraries sites.
My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal, Penguin Books: 2017 (first published by Viking: 2016)
Sometimes all that ten-year-old Leon possesses is his name.
So, much of his time is spent accumulating or enumerating the items that actually belong to him. But this is no mercenary acquisitiveness. He needs things with which to build a new life together with his baby brother, Jake, who is adopted into a new family – without Leon.
As the momentum of the novel picks up, with its gritty realist detail and layering of overlapping worlds, these items range from the toys he receives as Christmas presents, mainly from social workers (Dukes of Hazzard Racing Set, Meccano set, Action Man Cherilea Amphibious Jeep with trailer) to household provisions that he gathers together himself – baby food, tins, a bag of sugar, a blanket.
The novel charts a year in Leon’s life in which he…
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By Jo Manby
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Text Publishing Company, Australia: 2015)
This is a timeless book that will not age, like the works of James Baldwin, Maya Angelou or Toni Morrison. ‘This is required reading,’ Morrison herself has said, in a quote that foots the cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ bestseller, Between the World and Me.
Between the World and Me is written in the form of a letter addressed to Coates’ teenage son, a veritable prayer that is drenched in love and born out of struggle. It should make America sit up and take notice.
By Jo Manby
Cheetham to Cordova: Maurice Levine – A Manchester Man of the Thirties, by Maurice Levine. Neil Richardson, Manchester: 1984
Whilst reading Shadows on the Tundra, a new release by Peirene Press of the testimony of a Siberian gulag survivor, I was reminded of a slim, privately published volume that I first read some years ago while working on book abstracts at the AIU Centre.
Shadows on the Tundra, the story of the Lithuanian Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s horrifying experiences, is an incredibly important piece of international survival literature, belonging in the hallowed company of Anne Frank’s diaries, the works of Primo Levi and of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Cheetham to Cordova: A Manchester Man of the Thirties on the other hand provides the opportunity of a glimpse into the Lithuanian migrant experience here in the UK, as told autobiographically by Maurice Levine.
This week we’re reblogging a review of Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women, from Jo’s new Floralia blog (well worth following!).
And if you like this book Jo also recommends:
Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Sojourner Truth, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1997
Blues legacies and black feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis, New York: Vintage Books, 1999
Michelle Obama by Robin S. Doak, London: Raintree, 2015
Malala Yousafzai by Claire Throp, London: Raintree, 2016
Book: Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women, by Elena Favilli & Francesca Cavallo. First published in Great Britain by Particular Books, an imprint of Penguin Books: 2017
Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women is a book that brings together stories of women’s lives spanning human history and traversing the globe.
It’s where someone like Astrid Lindgren, Swedish writer born in 1907 and author of Pippi Longstocking (a much-loved children’s story about an archetypal rebel girl) can occupy the pages that follow Ashley Fiolek, the 27 year old American Motocross racer who does not let the fact that she was born hearing-impaired hold her back.
Where an archaeologist, Maria Reiche, born 1903, who left Germany to study the ancient Nazca lines of Peru, rolls up alongside Maria Montessori, physician and educator, who at the turn of the 20th century developed a new…
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Have you caught the dramatisation of Assata Shakur’s autobiography on Radio 4 this week? In a coincidence of timing the book has also made it to the top of Jo Manby’s review pile!
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur. First published in the UK by Zed Books Ltd, London (1988). This edition Lawrence Hill Books (an imprint of Chicago Review Press, Incorporated): Chicago, Illinois, 2014
Assata Shakur is the FBI’s most wanted woman. Since 1979 has lived in Cuba as a fugitive after being granted asylum there following her escape from prison. She is also a founding member of the Black Liberation Army and godmother of Tupac Shakur. This autobiography tells the story of the circumstances that brought her to her present day situation.
Jo Manby
A Different Kind of Daughter – The Girl who Hid from the Taliban in Plain Sight
by Maria Toorpakai with Katharine Holstein. First published in the UK by Bluebird (2016). This edition Bluebird (an imprint of Pan Macmillan): London, 2017
Maria Toorpakai is Pakistan’s number one female squash player, and is a professional player now living in Canada. This autobiography follows her journey.
In her prologue, Maria says ‘I needed to be outside, under the open sky and running free.’ However, born and brought up in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), specifically Waziristan, in Pakistan, this kind of behaviour was forbidden by tribal law. Even more punitive and suffocating were the edicts of the Taliban, which began to invade people’s lives in this conflicted area and beyond during Maria’s childhood and teens.
This review is adapted from an original piece published in the Centre’s journal Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World.
Book review: Streetsmart Schoolsmart: Urban Poverty and the Education of Adolescent Boys by Gilberto Q. Conchas & James Diego Vigil (Teachers College Press, Columbia University: New York and London 2012)
Review by Jo Manby
This is one of the books you find on the shelves of AIU Centre that starts out as an academic study but offers up so much more in the reading of it – a real insight into the potential for social change within the American education system and into the real life issues that affect young people there.
This review is adapted from an original piece published in the Centre’s journal Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World.
Book review: Moving in the Shadows: Violence in the Lives of Minority Women and Children, edited by Yasmin Rehman, Liz Kelly and Hannana Siddiqui (Ashgate: Farnham, Surrey & Burlington, Vermont 2013)
Review by Jo Manby
Yasmin Rehman, a doctoral candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies specialising in polygyny and English law; Liz Kelly, Professor of Sexualised Violence at London Metropolitan University and Director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit (CWASU), and Hannana Siddiqui, who has worked at Southall Black Sisters for 25 years, bring together here contributions from a range of academics, activists and practitioners, examining for the first time in one volume violence against women and children within UK minority communities.
The book is divided into three parts:
It seeks to ‘explore both commonalities and differences in the lives of minority women – in the forms of violence they experience, their meanings and consequences’ (p.9).
To mark International Slavery Day (23rd August), Jo Manby reviews:
The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, by Rebecca Shumway (University of Rochester Press: Rochester, NY & Woodbridge, Suffolk 2011) (Reprinted 2014)
The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade diverges from previous accounts of the relationship between Fante political history and the Atlantic slave trade, which have tended to focus on and to amalgamate Akan ancestry; the period of the gold trade (fifteenth to seventeenth century); or the era of British colonial rule, within the context of Ghana’s Gold Coast.
Instead, the focus here is on the development of ‘Fanteland’, a location of specific language and culture, the eighteenth-century political unification of Ghana’s coastal people, and the creation of a coalition government, which Shumway refers to as the Coastal Coalition.
This review is adapted from an original piece published in the Centre’s journal Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World.
Book review: Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America by Jonathan Kozol (Crown Publishers: New York 2012)
Review by Jo Manby
This book is evidence of the kind of enduring, personal relationship that an ethnographer or documentarist can build up within a community if they invest their time and open their hearts to those around them.
Jonathan Kozol has been working with children in inner-city schools in the United States for almost fifty years. Over several years, he has been in conversation with a group of children from one of its poorest urban neighbourhoods. He begins his story – the story of these children – with a picture of New York City’s poor and homeless people on Christmas Eve 1985, thousands of them ‘packed into decrepit, drug-infested shelters, most of which were old hotels situated in the middle of Manhattan’ (p.3).
Book Review: My People are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain by Aaron Dixon (Haymarket Books: Chicago 2012)
Review by Jo Manby
Despite the presence of a Black president in the White House, America persists in incarcerating unprecedented numbers of Black and ethnic minority males. The Sentencing Project states that ‘for Black males in their thirties, 1 in every 10 is in prison or jail on any given day’. This autobiographical work, My People are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain reminds us of the issues the Black Panther Party (BPP) stood for, most of which, including this and other racial injustices, remain unresolved today. Aaron Dixon gives us a first-hand account of the BPP’s history.
This review is adapted from an original piece published in the Centre’s journal Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World.
Book review: Black Power TV by Devorah Heitner (Duke University Press: Durham & London 2013)
Review by Jo Manby
A compelling and detailed chronicle of the way that a range of Black public affairs programmes arose within the history of American television during the period of the Black Power movement, this book examines four television shows in particular, both directly and indirectly funded by the (White) Ford Foundation, among other sources, and critical in allowing ‘the imagining of a Black nation and a distinctly African American consciousness’ (p.14).
Review by Jo Manby, adapted from an original piece published in the Centre’s journal Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World.
Book review: Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times by Robin D. G. Kelly (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass. and London, England 2012)
This four-part volume, hailed as a ‘collective biography’ and written by the author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, vividly evokes the network of calls and responses across continents that linked modern jazz and Africa at a time of burgeoning revolutionary freedom – the 1950s and 60s.
This review is adapted from an original piece published in the Centre’s journal Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World.
Book review: Darcus Howe: A Political Biography by Robin Bunce and Paul Field (Bloomsbury: London & New York, 2014)
Review by Jo Manby
A lively and incisive biography, dedicated to the memory of CLR James, Darcus Howe’s mentor and great uncle, whose ‘youthful rebellion was symbolized by his skipping his duties to illicitly play cricket’ (p.12), this volume throws into brilliant relief Howe’s importance in the history of radical politics and the struggle for racial justice.
Sin it is, no less… it puts out the sun at noon
– Herman Melville on slavery
Book review: The Empire of Necessity: The Untold History of a Slave Rebellion in the Age of Liberty by Greg Grandin (Oneworld: Great Britain, Australia & New York 2014)
Review by Jo Manby
This gripping book reads like an adventure story subtly underpinned by historical detail. It centres on a mutiny on board the slave ship Tryal whereby all its crew were killed, bar one.
On board, slave-rebels initiated a 24-hour deception, fooling the unsuspecting Captain Amasa Delano into coming aboard the apparently troubled, becalmed ship with water and supplies, finally leading to the descent of Delano’s own crew into barbaric slaughter of the slave-rebels.
Review by Jo Manby
Some of the books we acquire at the Resource Centre are new – others, like this one, new to us. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool was published in 2005, and at the time, was heralded as revealing a new type of anthropology in which ‘place emerges with a cultural agency of its own’ (Anna Tsing).
We have so many fantastic books in the library, it’s high time we started doing book reviews! This week Jo Manby has been reading Where Are You Really From? by Tim Brannigan (Blackstaff Press: Belfast 2010) 
‘Kola Kubes and Gelignite, Secrets and Lies – The true story of an extraordinary family’ is the subtitle of this fascinating memoir by the journalist Tim Brannigan. It is dedicated, in turn, to Peggy Brannigan, his ‘beautiful and extraordinary mum’; his brothers; his mum’s partner Tom, and finally to his ‘new-found brothers and sisters.’ Who they are and how he came across them is revealed in the later chapters of the book.
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