My Goal Is To Get Everybody In

You Notice Patterns. White Guests Often Are Mortified - That Word Again - When They Learn Their Ancestors Owned Slaves. But I've Never Had A Black Guest Who Was Upset To Learn About White Ancestry That Probably Involved Forced Sexual Relations.

Ever Since I Watched 'roots,' I've Dreamed Of Tracing My African Ancestry And Helping Other People Do The Same.

Mama And I Would Go To A Funeral And She'd Stand Up To Read The Dead Person's Eulogy. She Made The Ignorant And Ugly Sound Like Scholars And Movie Stars, Turned The Mean And Evil Into Saints And Angels. She Knew What People Had Meant To Be In Their Hearts, Not What The World Had Forced Them To Become. She Knew The Ways In Which Working Too Hard For Paltry Wages Could Turn You Mean And Cold, Could Kill The Thing That Made You Laugh.

Arnold Rampersad's Stunningly Revealing Biography Has, At Long Last, Unveiled-in Magisterial Prose-the Very Complex And Vulnerable Man Behind Ralph Ellison's Own Masks And Myths. One Of The Nation's Most Brilliant Writers Emerges As All The More Fascinating Precisely Because He Was So Very Human. Painstakingly Researched And Compellingly Written, Ralph Ellison Is A Masterwork Of The Genre Of Literary Biography.

People Are Afraid, And When People Are Afraid, When Their Pie Is Shrinking, They Look For Somebody To Hate. They Look For Somebody To Blame. And A Real Leader Speaks To Anxiety And To Fear And Allays Those Fears, Assuages Anxiety.