Sixteen year-old Darrell Wallace, Jr. has earned 2010 Sunoco Rookie of the Year honors in the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East.
Wallace compiled five top-fives and seven top-10s in 10 races and finished third in the overall season standings. His rookie campaign was highlighted by victories at Greenville (S.C.) Pickens Speedway and Lee (N.H.) USA Speedway. Winning the Greenville race in his series debut marked the first victory in the 24-year history of the K&N Pro Series East for an African-American driver.
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Harvard Professor and author Annette Gordon-Reed, 51, whose book “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” (W. W. Norton) won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History and the 2008 National Book Award for nonfiction, is among the 23 recipients of the $500,000 “genius awards” to be announced on Tuesday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Ms. Gordon-Reed investigated the story of the slave family that included Sally Hemings, a slave owned by Jefferson who scholars widely believe bore his children. A New Yorker, Ms. Gordon-Reed teaches law and history at Harvard. Some of her grant will go toward travel expenses as she researches another book on the Hemings, she said.
Twelve men and 11 women, ranging in age from 30 to 72, were named MacArthur fellows this year. All will receive $100,000 a year for five years, no strings attached. Since the inception of the program in 1981 and including this year’s fellows, 828 people, ranging in age from 18 to 82 at the time of their selection, have been named.
article information via nytimes.com
Harvard Professor and author Annette Gordon-Reed, 51, whose book “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” (W. W. Norton) won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History and the 2008 National Book Award for nonfiction, is among the 23 recipients of the $500,000 “genius awards” to be announced on Tuesday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Ms. Gordon-Reed investigated the story of the slave family that included Sally Hemings, a slave owned by Jefferson who scholars widely believe bore his children. A New Yorker, Ms. Gordon-Reed teaches law and history at Harvard. Some of her grant will go toward travel expenses as she researches another book on the Hemings, she said.
Twelve men and 11 women, ranging in age from 30 to 72, were named MacArthur fellows this year. All will receive $100,000 a year for five years, no strings attached. Since the inception of the program in 1981 and including this year’s fellows, 828 people, ranging in age from 18 to 82 at the time of their selection, have been named.
article information via nytimes.com
NEW YORK — He couldn’t go to medical school in New York, so James McCune Smith went to Scotland for his degree and returned home to treat the city’s poor. The degree he earned in 1837 made him the nation’s first professionally trained African-American doctor. He set up a medical practice in lower Manhattan and became the resident physician at an orphanage. Celebrated during his lifetime as a teacher, writer and anti-slavery leader, Smith fell into obscurity after his death in 1865 and was buried in an unmarked grave.
On Sunday, descendants who only recently learned they had a black ancestor, will honor Smith at his Brooklyn grave. It will be marked with a new tombstone. “He was one of the leaders within the movement to abolish slavery, and he was one of the most original and innovative writers of his time,” said John Stauffer, a professor of African-American studies at Harvard University who has written about Smith and edited a collection of his works. The story of why Smith was nearly overlooked by history and buried in an unmarked grave is in part due to the centuries-old practice of light-skinned blacks “passing” as white to escape racial prejudice.
Smith’s mother had been a slave; his father was white. Three of his children lived to adulthood, and they all apparently passed as white, scholars say. Smith’s great-great-great-granddaughter, Greta Blau of New Haven, Conn., said that none of his descendants was told that they had a black ancestor, let alone such an accomplished one. Blau came across her family connection while taking a course in the history of blacks in New York City. It was there that she came across the name James McCune Smith, which rang a bell. The name was inscribed in a family Bible belonging to her grandmother, Antoinette Martignoni.
Blau consulted with Stauffer, and they did some research and determined that the James McCune Smith who was known as America’s first black doctor was indeed her forebear. “I never, ever would have thought that I had a black ancestor,” Blau said. She added, “We’re all really happy. … He was a really amazing person in so many ways.” Smith lived and died during a time in America when little attention was given to the achievements of black people. Smith’s children refused to promote their father’s legacy and even shunned their African-American heritage. While hardly a household name, Smith was well known enough that a public school in Harlem was named after him. Danny Glover portrayed him in a video produced by the New York Historical Society.
Smith also was the first African-American to publish scholarly studies in peer-reviewed medical journals, Stauffer said. He also wrote essays countering theories of black racial inferiority that had currency then. He was a friend and associate of famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and he wrote the introduction to Douglass’ “My Bondage and My Freedom.” Smith set up a medical practice and a pharmacy in what is now Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. He also was the resident physician at the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. The orphanage burned to the ground in 1863 amid riots by white working-class immigrants over the Civil War draft. Smith and other prominent African-Americans fled to Brooklyn, then a separate city.
The asylum was re-established at a new location and survives today; it’s called Harlem Dowling. Smith championed educational opportunities as a founding member of the New York Society for Promotion of Education of Colored Children. He also helped organize New York’s resistance to the Fugitive Slave act of 1850, which decreed that slaves who escaped to the North be returned to their owners. Stauffer said Smith’s reputation suffers in comparison to Douglass’ because he was not a fiery speaker like Douglass. “He didn’t have the public persona,” Stauffer said. “He preferred writing.”
Carla Peterson, a professor of English at the University of Maryland who has written about Smith in a forthcoming book, “Black Gotham: An African American Family History,” said Smith did not share Douglass’ dramatic history of escape from slavery. “He did not live the life of a slave,” Peterson said. “He could not write a slave narrative.” But she said Smith was “incredibly significant.” “He’s remarkable for what he could do for his community,” she said.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Organizers in distressed communities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., will soon begin plans to create what the Department of Education envisions as “Promise Neighborhoods,” where children and families receive support services that boost a student’s chance of being successful in school. Twenty-one applicants for the program to transform communities and student outcomes were named on Tuesday. They will receive planning grants of up to $500,000. “Communities across the country recognize that education is the one true path out of poverty,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. “These Promise Neighborhoods applicants are committed to putting schools at the center of their work to provide comprehensive services for young children and students.”
The program is modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone, which provides comprehensive support for families from pregnancy through birth, education through college and career. Children in the program’s charter schools have made impressive gains on standardized tests and in closing the achievement gap.
More than 300 communities applied to become Promise Neighborhoods. Applicants hope they can reproduce the results of the Harlem Children’s Zone, even if they can’t create charter schools and will have a fraction of the organization’s $84 million budget. “If we want to address the challenges of student achievement and success, you have to work in the traditional public school system,” said Sheena Wright, president and CEO of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem, one of the organizations that was awarded a Promise Neighborhoods grant. The local public high school Wright’s group works with has attained strong results, including a graduation rate of more than 90 percent for African American men, she said.
Dreama Gentry, director for external affairs at Berea College, which will work with three communities in rural Kentucky, said a smaller budget wasn’t a barrier to improving student outcomes. The key will be engaging the community, particularly those who have lost faith in the value of education, she said. “That’s what it takes to create the change, not necessarily the big budget,” Gentry said. The Promise Neighborhoods were part of President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign platform, and he has requested $210 million in the 2011 budget to implement the program and plan for more Promise Neighborhoods. Duncan said Tuesday that if less is granted, “a lot of children will lose out.” The idea is this: Students don’t learn in isolation, and if they come to school with an empty stomach, or don’t feel safe at home, they’ll have a harder time learning in the classroom.
“We’re hoping we can bring families back together,” said Geri Small, chief professional officer for the Boys & Girls Club of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, one of the organizations that won the grant. Duncan visited the Montana reservation last year, which has been plagued by high dropout rates and unemployment. The community has been challenged by drug and alcohol abuse, and the breakdown of the family structure, with many children in single family households, or with a parent in jail, Small said. “The whole community, all the different organizations came together,” she said.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Organizers in distressed communities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., will soon begin plans to create what the Department of Education envisions as “Promise Neighborhoods,” where children and families receive support services that boost a student’s chance of being successful in school. Twenty-one applicants for the program to transform communities and student outcomes were named on Tuesday. They will receive planning grants of up to $500,000. “Communities across the country recognize that education is the one true path out of poverty,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. “These Promise Neighborhoods applicants are committed to putting schools at the center of their work to provide comprehensive services for young children and students.”
The program is modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone, which provides comprehensive support for families from pregnancy through birth, education through college and career. Children in the program’s charter schools have made impressive gains on standardized tests and in closing the achievement gap.
More than 300 communities applied to become Promise Neighborhoods. Applicants hope they can reproduce the results of the Harlem Children’s Zone, even if they can’t create charter schools and will have a fraction of the organization’s $84 million budget. “If we want to address the challenges of student achievement and success, you have to work in the traditional public school system,” said Sheena Wright, president and CEO of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem, one of the organizations that was awarded a Promise Neighborhoods grant. The local public high school Wright’s group works with has attained strong results, including a graduation rate of more than 90 percent for African American men, she said.
Dreama Gentry, director for external affairs at Berea College, which will work with three communities in rural Kentucky, said a smaller budget wasn’t a barrier to improving student outcomes. The key will be engaging the community, particularly those who have lost faith in the value of education, she said. “That’s what it takes to create the change, not necessarily the big budget,” Gentry said. The Promise Neighborhoods were part of President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign platform, and he has requested $210 million in the 2011 budget to implement the program and plan for more Promise Neighborhoods. Duncan said Tuesday that if less is granted, “a lot of children will lose out.” The idea is this: Students don’t learn in isolation, and if they come to school with an empty stomach, or don’t feel safe at home, they’ll have a harder time learning in the classroom.
“We’re hoping we can bring families back together,” said Geri Small, chief professional officer for the Boys & Girls Club of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, one of the organizations that won the grant. Duncan visited the Montana reservation last year, which has been plagued by high dropout rates and unemployment. The community has been challenged by drug and alcohol abuse, and the breakdown of the family structure, with many children in single family households, or with a parent in jail, Small said. “The whole community, all the different organizations came together,” she said.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Wata Nabieu takes the chocolate bar and carefully unwraps the top. She giggles at us watching her and breaks off a piece, giving it a nervous nibble. Then she passes it to her three-year-old daughter, Yema. Wata pulls the gold wrapper back more and bites. She closes her eyes. “Milk… sugar… cocoa?” she murmurs. Her smile widens. She takes a bigger bite. It’s a privilege to watch someone eat chocolate for the first time: a Willy Wonka moment. All the more special because 40-year-old Wata Nabieu has laboured for most of her life in the cocoa plantations of Sierra Leoneso that other people can eat chocolate. What if she didn’t like it?
We are sitting under one of the cocoa trees planted 30 years ago by Wata’s father. Now she works the farm alone, except at harvest time when the neighbours help. Most days she’s out here, chasing monkeys and birds away from the ripening fruit, clearing undergrowth – “In it there can be hidden snakes. Or men”. On the back of Wata’s ragged T-shirt, inherited from an NGO, are the words “Love and development”. Wata finishes off the finger bar of milk chocolate. The gold foil falls to the ground, where it settles beside a many-horned orange-pink orchid, a flower straight from the rainforest in Avatar. The chocolate is made by the Divine Chocolate company which has, since last year, been using Fairtrade Sierra Leonean cocoa – including the beans from Wata’s trees.
What’s the verdict? We ask. “Deya,” says Wata. “It’s fine.” She grins. Yema, meanwhile, is busy licking her fingers having painted her bare tummy with melted chocolate. Not many people in Wata’s village of cocoa and coffee farmers have ever tasted the product of their work – but then there are very few luxuries here in the remote east of a country that consistently comes at the bottom of the United Nations lists of wealth and development. One in six women in Sierra Leone will die in childbirth, and one in four children will not reach the age of five. Wata, like more than half the women her age, cannot read and has never been to school.
Wata and her family have known a lot of death: she has lost her father, her brother and her first husband. They all died during Sierra Leone’s vicious 11-year civil war, which finally came to an end in 2002. All of the country suffered, as rebel militias twice seized control, with a cruel policy of savage retribution against civilians who did not support them. Rape and murder were common, children forced to become soldiers and turned against their own families, and a usual punishment for opposition the amputation of your hands or arms. “Short sleeve, or long sleeve?” asked the militia men as they raised their machetes. When I went to Sierra Leone as a reporter in 2000, the streets of the capital were full of children and adults with missing limbs.
Kenema, the district where Wata and her family live, was particularly dangerous then: it’s here that diamonds, Sierra Leone’s only major source of wealth, are found. Lust for the minerals fuelled the civil war, and the resulting turmoil made Wata and the rest of the village part-time refugees for nearly a decade. “When we ran away from the rebel soldiers, that’s when my husband was killed. Then we all lived by finding wood in the forest and selling it. Sometimes we would sneak back home to harvest the cocoa from our trees. But it was very dangerous.” One of the cocoa farmers, Ibrahim Moseray, told me he had cherished a dream during that terrible time. Before the war, in the early 1990s, Ibrahim worked sometimes for a Scots cocoa buyer who would visit Kenema regularly to negotiate for cocoa beans from the Lebanese traders who bought from the villages. Ibrahim had learnt a lot about the trade, about the profits and the tricks – how the buyers would visit the villages during the dry months, “the hunger season”, and lend the families rice.
When the cocoa crop was ready in January the buyers would reclaim the debt, asking payment of one sack of cocoa beans for one of rice: grotesquely unfair. But the villagers, without communications or education, unaware of the real price of cocoa, were in no position to argue. “And they had to feed their children,” says Ibrahim. Ibrahim’s dream, as the families lived on the run during the war, was simple: “Things were at their worst in 1998. We were all displaced because of the war, the cocoa price had collapsed and the buyers were giving farmers promissory notes, not even money. So we started thinking: after the war we’re going to have to export the cocoa ourselves. “We formed a cocoa group to go to the village with the government soldiers to harvest our trees, and so we started to work together. We called ourselves “Kpeya” which means “Give way” in Mende – we were calling on the world to give way and let us sell our cocoa for ourselves.”
When the war ended, Kpeya made a useful alliance with Africa’s most successful cocoa cooperative, Kuapa Kokoo (Good Cocoa Farmers’ Company) in Ghana. Set up in 1993 and now with 47,000 farmer members, Kuapa is the main source of Fairtrade chocolate, now supplying Cadbury (for Dairy Milk) and Mars (for KitKat). It owns nearly half of Britain’s Divine chocolate company, which had a £12.5m turnover last year – a share of which goes straight back to the farmers. The advice from Kuapa and the NGOs to the Sierra Leonean farmers was plain – they needed to produce better cocoa to attract higher prices. So training was set up for the cocoa farmers of Kpeya by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. They re-learned their trade in everything from pruning trees and pest control to better fermenting and drying of the cocoa beans. And they were also taught to farm without recourse to any chemicals. Fertilisers and pesticides are not easy to get hold of in rural Sierra Leone, but it means the Kpeya chocolate can be called organic, too.
By last year, Kpeya was ready to achieve the old dream of selling its cocoa direct for export. Its first container – some 12.5 tonnes – of high quality, Fairtrade-certified cocoa went to Europe, to become Divine Chocolate. The 300 farmers received an above the market price for their beans, and put some of the premium into building storage sheds and an office from which to run the cooperative. Divine bought them a pick-up truck. And the effects in villages such as Batiama were immediate: everyone, I was told with pride, now owns a pair of shoes. On the road into Kenema – newly rebuilt with Chinese aid money – there are neat piles of rocks: one source of income for landless rural people is to gather them by hand in the hope someone laying concrete or building a house may need the rubble. Many of the bigger buildings we pass, like the schools or Kenema’s college, are still roofless and derelict eight years after the war.
Kenema is a frontier town. In its shabby, busy streets there are diamond dealers’ shops, casinos and banks with armed guards outside them; in the one hotel large Lebanese men smoke hookahs as they do business with unfriendly white men with leathery skin. Ibrahim Moseray, Kpeya’s elected manager, looks out of place here in his tribal clothes – he is wearing the uniform of hereditary speaker for the chief. But he is full of confidence as we go to see his bank manager. This official, Mr Turay, is friendly and impressed when presented with some Divine chocolate, but firm: he’s not going to offer credit to a bunch of cocoa farmers from the sticks. He needs better assurances of Kpeya’s financial solidity. Ibrahim looks disappointed. He needs cash to complete the cocoa purchases as the harvest time comes to an end. It is hard trying to persuade the 300 farmer-members of Kpeya to resist the Lebanese dealers’ offers (and the hunger pangs) and hold out for the better prices he knows he can offer them, when the advance payment for this year’s harvest turns up.
Building the farmers’ faith in the new organisation is not easy: the old-time traders have every reason to hope Kpeya will fail. One Dutch cocoa-buyer told a meeting he didn’t want high quality cocoa from Sierra Leone – he could make more money out of the poor quality stuff. And it seems that sometimes everything from officialdom to the local thieves who stole the sink from the new office the other day are lining up against Kpeya. “Everyone’s trying to squeeze us, put us out of business,” says Ibrahim, grinning. “The buyers are against us because they know we’re pushing prices up, and educating the farmers. But our farmers our saying no to them: ‘We’re with Kpeya till we die’. We bought them all mobile phones, so they could tell us what was going on, and if they were being misinformed about the prices, we could tell them the truth.” Ibrahim delights in the battle – he says that Kpeya’s next move this harvest season will be to put up the price of a pound of dried beans by 50 leones (about 1p). This will force all the traders to pay more to all the farmers in the region. Already the price of cocoa to the farmers is, at 55p a pound, a third higher than it was last season.
Back in the village Momoh Sellu, the chairman of Kpeya Agricultural Enterprise, tells me about a man who came to the village when he was a child. “I think he was the district officer, one of the Englishmen. They were good men, they built schools and they built roads. He came here in 1933, to the village, and told my father that he ought to plant cocoa. He taught him how to do it and how to look after the plants. He said that we could eat the fruit now, but one day it would make us money. And it was good advice.” Since the Kpeya cooperative was formed the village has been working together much more, Sellu says. The 455 people of Batiama now help each other harvest and dry the beans. The Kpeya committee decided to pay for Wata Nabieu to take her blind son to Freetown, the capital, so he could have an operation that restored his sight. There was a village raffle: the winners getting cash to put shiny zinc sheets on their houses in place of the palm thatch roofs. And with some of the extra cash from the Fairtrade price they have hired a primary teacher. Before the children had to walk three miles to school. “It’s good to be a cocoa farmer – you are respected,” says Sellu happily. “Cocoa farmers usually are very notable in society – they have two or three wives.” Mrs Sellu, Mamie, who is listening, tells me he is useless and too old: but she agrees that the cooperative has been a good thing. “Before when the buyer came he would deduct money as interest on our loans. I’m not educated, and I could not even understand. Now the co-op gives us free loans, if we need them.”
Mamie Sellu is 80, she thinks. She has seen terrible times – two of her children were killed in the war, and she has seen many “hungry seasons” in the annual dry months. She says she isn’t worried now for herself, but for her eight surviving children and 15 grandchildren. Their food and their education depend on an assured price for cocoa. “I don’t want to die and leave my children poor – I’m sending them to school so they can take care of themselves. If they have no way of getting money, my soul will not rest in peace.” Before we leave we watch the effects of a lot of chocolate on children not used to it: the biggest mass sugar high I’ve ever been a party to. The games get wilder, and we end with a huge tournament of grandmother’s footsteps. The giggling, squealing children tumble over each other while the adults smile and gossip. War and famine seem far away. Could those times come again? I ask Ibrahim Moseray. “Everybody smelled the war, everyone felt it,” he says. “They know now what war means. They know we can’t go back.”
article via guardian.co.uk/
via tnt.tv
TNT has written a prescription for a third season of the powerful medical drama HAWTHORNE, starring and executive-produced by Jada Pinkett Smith (Collateral, The Matrix trilogy). TNT has ordered 10 new episodes of the hit series, which is slated to return in 2011. Created by Emmy® winner John Masius (St. Elsewhere, Providence, Dead Like Me), HAWTHORNE premiered in summer 2009 and ranked as one of ad-supported cable’s Top 5 new series of the year. In its second season in summer 2010, the series continued its success, averaging 3.7 million viewers and ranking as ad-supported cable’s #1 Tuesday program among women 25-54.
“With its memorable characters, powerful performances and moving storylines, HAWTHORNE takes us on a dramatic journey through the world of a hospital on the brink of collapse,” said Michael Wright, executive vice president and head of programming for TNT, TBS and Turner Classic Movies (TCM). “This series has performed extremely well among our key demos and proven itself to be a great summer series. We are very excited to continue working with Jada and HAWTHORNE’s outstanding production team and cast.”
HAWTHORNE stars Pinkett Smith as Christina Hawthorne, an impassioned Chief Nursing Officer struggling to whip a failing hospital – and her personal life – into shape. Michael Vartan (Alias) co-stars as Dr. Tom Wakefield, who has a complicated personal relationship with Christina. The series also stars Suleka Mathew (Men in Trees), David Julian Hirsh (Lovebites), Christina Moore (90210), Vanessa Lengies (American Dreams) and Hannah Hodson (The Ron Clark Story).
HAWTHORNE comes to TNT from Sony Pictures Television in association with Overbrook Productions and Jamie Tarses’ FanFare Productions. The second season of HAWTHORNE was executive-produced by Pinkett Smith; Glen Mazzara (The Shield, Crash, Life); Jamie Tarses (My Boys, TNT’s upcoming series Franklin & Bash); Masius; and Miguel Melendez.
article via deadline.com
via tnt.tv
TNT has written a prescription for a third season of the powerful medical drama HAWTHORNE, starring and executive-produced by Jada Pinkett Smith (Collateral, The Matrix trilogy). TNT has ordered 10 new episodes of the hit series, which is slated to return in 2011. Created by Emmy® winner John Masius (St. Elsewhere, Providence, Dead Like Me), HAWTHORNE premiered in summer 2009 and ranked as one of ad-supported cable’s Top 5 new series of the year. In its second season in summer 2010, the series continued its success, averaging 3.7 million viewers and ranking as ad-supported cable’s #1 Tuesday program among women 25-54.
“With its memorable characters, powerful performances and moving storylines, HAWTHORNE takes us on a dramatic journey through the world of a hospital on the brink of collapse,” said Michael Wright, executive vice president and head of programming for TNT, TBS and Turner Classic Movies (TCM). “This series has performed extremely well among our key demos and proven itself to be a great summer series. We are very excited to continue working with Jada and HAWTHORNE’s outstanding production team and cast.”
HAWTHORNE stars Pinkett Smith as Christina Hawthorne, an impassioned Chief Nursing Officer struggling to whip a failing hospital – and her personal life – into shape. Michael Vartan (Alias) co-stars as Dr. Tom Wakefield, who has a complicated personal relationship with Christina. The series also stars Suleka Mathew (Men in Trees), David Julian Hirsh (Lovebites), Christina Moore (90210), Vanessa Lengies (American Dreams) and Hannah Hodson (The Ron Clark Story).
HAWTHORNE comes to TNT from Sony Pictures Television in association with Overbrook Productions and Jamie Tarses’ FanFare Productions. The second season of HAWTHORNE was executive-produced by Pinkett Smith; Glen Mazzara (The Shield, Crash, Life); Jamie Tarses (My Boys, TNT’s upcoming series Franklin & Bash); Masius; and Miguel Melendez.
article via deadline.com
via google.com
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama, a publishing phenomenon even before he won the White House, has a new book about to hit the shelves — profiling inspirational historic Americans for children.
“Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to my Daughters” is a 40-page picture book and will have an initial print run of half a million copies when it is released on November 16 — not coincidentally two weeks after congressional elections.
Obama penned the book before he was elected and proceeds from its sale will go to a scholarship fund for the children of US soldiers killed or disabled in wars abroad. The president’s publisher, Random House, praised the work as an “inspiring marriage of words and images, history and story.” “‘Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters’ celebrates the characteristics that unite all Americans — the potential to pursue our dreams and forge our own paths,” the company said in a press release.
The book celebrates figures including the first president George Washington, and Jackie Robinson, who broke down barriers by becoming the first African American baseball player in the major leagues. The title is taken from the lyrics of “My Country, ‘Tis of thee” an early American patriotic song. Obama’s previous books, the autobiographical “Dreams from My Father” published in 1995, and the political manifesto “The Audacity of Hope” which came out in 2006, have been huge international bestsellers. They have also secured Obama’s financial future. The president and his wife Michelle declared a joint gross income of 5.5 million dollars for 2009 alone — almost all of it based on royalties from his books.
Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved.