Tayé Foster Bradshaw's Bookshelf

Sometimes we have to laugh to keep from crying because the tears won't fix this problem. What problem? Several. Our country has been overtaken to an enormous degree by multinational corporations whose only loyalty is to the bottom line.  It is destroying us from within, and even more so, since it also brought our latent racism and classism to the surface with the election of President Obama.  And the boogyman is hard to pinpoint now. Right now, the people are taking to the streets in Egypt to say "enough is enough" against their 30 years-in-power leader.  Bands of young men, understanding the boiling point of being fed up, have armed themselves with sticks to protect their respective neighborhoods, because when protest emotions get high, sometimes things happen, especially when those protests are because of years and years, generations of mistreatment. As I thought about our people, for all people who want a decent middle class living, the right to live, are my

I said it before and will say it again, we are on a rapid downhill spiral toward destruction. This country saddens me.  We claim to be the moral absolute and there are rallys for everything from saving the whales to puppy mills and stopping abortion and corporate largesse, yet in all of this, there is a lack of humanity, the simple human decency of a hello. I guess it all came to me the other day when I was finally reaquainted with the wonders of television and the Internet (my home system was briefly indisposed and now repaired) and was flooded with all the things that happened in my week absence.  I learned about Keith Olbermann's thoughtful, insightful, and intelligent commentary being silenced for the sake of corporate greed, media ratings, and new owners of MSNBC.  I read that Oscar de la Renta didn't like First Lady Michelle Obama's choice of dress for the state dinner and he just had to criticize her when all she has ever tried to do is be a real woman with a rea

This was a magnificient and lyrical streetcar through the streets and lives that made up black D.C. from the early days to the Carter administration.  I delighted in this collection of stories, of lives, seen in glimpses, as if I was riding a streetcar in the evening, catching snatches of their lives through lamp-lit windows. These stories, told through the voices of young and old women, felt in the hopes of young and old men, were a delicious morsel in this start to 2011.  Edward P. Jones is masterful with the language and like an artist, paints a picture that is forever etched in memory. The writer's pen was a visual map of words that led me to feel as if I was transported "right down the middle of the street" with my heart intersecting with the wanting and needing of something right "up there."  It was hard for me to choose just one story.  I like the little girl who raised pigeons with just her father as her guide through growing up and I saw years ahe