From: Lindsay, Nina <nlindsay>
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 12:03:18 -0800

It's funny how differently a book can be read. I also noted McWhorter's foreword, in which she provides some context for her priveleged-narrator point of view...I just felt that for the audience, I wanted to see more context for her comments throughout the text.

Thanks for the detailed comments--I always appreciate having an insight into this sort of discussion.

Nina

 Message----From: Hollis Rudiger [mailto:hmrudiger at education.wisc.edu] Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2004 8:48 AM To: ccbc-net at ccbc.education.wisc.edu; nlindsay at oaklandlibrary.org Subject: Re: [ccbc-net] : CCBC Newbery Discussion, McWhorter


Hi Nina,

You bring up a lot of really good points, and I am sorry I have not responded to you sooner. I have dug up some notes and,

I will do my best to summarize what our Mock Committee said:

Committee members appreciated the direct, personal tone of the book. The author communicated about the time period from her personal perspective, which for me anyway, was made very clear by the intro and the epilogue. It is understood that she is not speaking on behalf of ALL black people, but rather, on those she saw and knew, and it is exactly this very honest and vulnerable approach which made the book so accessible. She shared her own journey, and that of her father, warts and all.

People appreciated the huge number of biographical references and antecdotes about a wide variety of people, (not just Rosa Parks and MLK Jr. for example, we learn about Carmichael, James Meredith, Rustin, Abernethy).

The inclusion of what was considered more radical groups, like SNCC, and the de-emphasis on MLK Jr.'s singular power in the movement.

The organization and visual ease-- The colored boxes and the chapter headings which helped organize the evolution of the movement

One person commented on how much detail there was in each section (we learn more details about Emmit Till as a person, for example than in the entire book about him written last year!) and how simultaneously, the book feels succinct and elegant.

She was somehow able to explain the white supremamcists without defending them. (One key line was, "I was a white supremacist but I was not prejudiced." A nuanced distinction for her, at the time, which becomes very obviously flawed as the reader continues in the books.) Her own self-irony.

Nina, after reading your comments I went back and reread, and it's interesting that what I, and others, originally lauded as a very inclusive and lengthy list of key events, people, dates, organizations, you read as "mentioned fleetingly and without appropriate context" The book reads as a time line, and would be 500 pages long if each moment were discussed in any more depth. It covers 14 years!

This was pretty much our discussion. It was an overwhelming favorite, and every member of the group had something to say.

Speaking for just me, I appreciate your (and others') sensitivity to sweeping generalizations, and an apparent lack of documentation-- But for me, the fact that it is *McWhorter's* experience of the movement relieves her of some of the responsibilities to document every detail. SHe writes what she saw and how she remembered, and then supplies a nice list of resources at the end and an extensive bibliography. And Fred Shuttlesworth's approval and endorsement are also documentation enough for me.

Hollis

(Peace and Good wishes to the CCBC Net community this season!)

Hollis Margaret Rudiger, Librarian Cooperative Children's Book Center University of Wisconsin-School of Education 4290 Helen C. White Hall 600 North Park St. Madison, WI 53706

hmrudiger at education.wisc.edu Voice: 608&3930 Fax: 608&2I33 www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/

Thanks for sharing the results of your discussion. Can you share any comments about McWhorter's Dream of Freedom? I found it myself a very flaw and troubling book.
  To me it reads very choppily, as if it were patched together from her other writings, and not presented in the best way possible to her audience. Many things are mentioned fleetingly without appropriate context, (p.23 The Birth of a Nation; p.80 Letter to Birmingham; p.97 JFKs assasination) or awkwardly/only-half explained (p.44-5 distiction between effect of the boycott and the NAACP; p.53 "resegregation" of schools). Combined with a lack of documentation, this book to me does not "[display] respect for children's understandings, abilities, and appreciations."
  I'm also puzzled and disturbed by some comments she makes about how black people felt during that time, without giving us any evidence. A couple of places I marked:
  p.15

"They began to accept a form of social insanity as reasonable." Did blacks really consider it reasonable?

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p.16

"black people began to believe in the inferiority inflicted on them from the outside." I'm similarly startled by this comment. She needs to show more to say something like this.

 

Now, I know well that every committee is different, and I don't know what the discussion was like for your Mock election. But I'd love a little bit of insight into the discussion on this one, since it is a title that's being
"talked about".

 

Thanks,

Nina

 

Nina Lindsay, Librarian Children's Room Oakland Public Library 125 14th Street Oakland CA 94612
(510) 238615 fax (510) 238h65 nlindsay at oaklandlibrary.org
Received on Wed 22 Dec 2004 02:03:18 PM CST