For The Love of the Book
The National Book Awards are a yearly bibliophile's Oscar's, Emmy's, Tony's, all rolled into one. It gives recognition and validation to those writers, authors, poets, essayists, dreamers who do the lonely job of sitting down before a blank screen, blank page, or blank notebook to extrapolitate some thought, some feeling, some moment and bring it to live on the page. The awards include fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. It was a delight to know that political commentator and blogger, Ta-Nehisi Coates's book w,as one of those awarded. He wrote a concise emotive about the 2000 murder of his Howard University classmate. He was in a black father's body writing to his black son. His touching, sometimes painful, very revealing memory was a bit of a pinch in that there is nothing new under the sun, black male bodies have been suspect, even clean cut, nerdy college students going home. In a time before social media, smart phones, cameras to record the events and a h