$15.00
San Juan Hill is an inspirational story of the strength and survival of a young boy growing up in NYC's Amsterdam Projects in the 50s/60s. It is the story of a racially diverse community coalescing to prepare its youth for the future and how from the wretched arose the worthy. Faced with peer pressure, racism and drugs, but anchored by a strong southern family, the young man emerges ready to take his first leap towards success.
San Juan Hill is an inspirational story of the strength and survival of a young boy growing up in NYC’s Amsterdam Projects in the 50s/60s. It is the story of a racially diverse community coalescing to prepare its youth for the future and how from the wretched arose the worthy. Faced with peer pressure, racism and drugs, but anchored by a strong southern family, the young man emerges ready to take his first leap towards success.
The bebop era was a period in time where African descendants took European musical instruments and bent them to their well so that these European instruments told the story of African Americans in a uniquely African American voice. In Swing, Hard Bop, Bop & Bebop you will find the musical history of over 60 of the greatest jazz artists of swing and bebop music ever assembled. Here you'll find delicate facts about the lives of these great men and women of jazz; where and when they were born, where they went to school, how they got started playing an instrument or singing, the trials and tribulations of their lives - but more - tributes are also paid to the venues and clubs where bebop was featured; places like Minton's Playhouse where Thelonious Monk was in the house band and where bebop was invented, Birdland, named for Charlie (YardBird) Parker, one of the creators of bebop, and even the Jazz Mobile that brought popular jazz bands to New York City's jazz fans in Harlem free of charge.
Come along on this anthropological urban dig through the ruins of 1950’s San Juan Hill. The author has landscaped the customs, language, and social habits of the people of a New York City community. 191 subjects of the Amsterdam community were sketched in poetic portraits that together tell their story and uncover the unique quality that exist among them; a quality that united them into a solid nurturing community.
“Notes from 1619” is a collection of poetry written in remembrance of one man’s ancestral linkage to the arrival of the first Africans four hundred years ago in what became the United States of America. It is a testimony on the major events that shaped and propelled black lives since Jamestown and in that sense represents the stories of the 40 million African Americans who are the descendants of enslaved people – making “Notes from 1619” their narrative too. The mixture of poems is organized in a chronology that mirrors the history of race relations in America. The journey starts off with a voyeur’s view of the naked celebratory dance of a young bride-to-be engaging in her tribal solitary fertility ocean pirouette – a scene that conveys a sense of the tranquil paradise that existed before the arrival of the barbarians. The very next poem explodes into a scene of carnage, fire, pillage and rampage as humans are loaded in ships for the journey across the Middle Passage and from there the poems quickly assemble to recount the decadent story of race in America.
The author hopes that these poems will educate white readers on their connections to the architects of the system of slavery and all the racial horrors that are a direct result of slavery in a way that would encourage them to make a proper moral assessment on these people’s role in history. The author realize that because the poems exposed white barbarism in the stark terms in which they were rendered, Readers may missed the point completely by mistaking the honest bluntness of the poems for the blinding bitterness that could lead to the mistaken assertion that all whites are racist. So the author asserts that all though all white people are not racist, they all benefitted from racism thus they all must contribute to the solution – that is the point of these edgy poems. “I know that there are many unbiased white people who are self-assured enough to know that they would still fare well in an unbiased society, they are the hope of this book.”
Reading “Notes from 1619” will not be a sunny stroll in the park, but rather a trek through a minefield that makes you better for having successfully maneuvered through it. Reading “Notes from 1619” is perhaps, the closest many of you will ever get to the pain created by white supremacy and suffered by African Americans and, it is the author’s hope, that this moves you to become a catalyst for justice - now.
The poems in this book were written over a forty-seven year period, between 1965 and 2012. They are arranged in two sections. The first section is called The Reconstruction. The poems in this section represent the era when the author’s literary universe was formulating anew 1979 to the present. This reframing of his mind-set started a decade or so after the end of legal segregation in the South and the establishment of a handful of national laws to protect the civil rights of African Americans. This was also when restrictions on black people in almost every field of endeavor started crumbling down. The second section of the book is called The Insurrection. The poems in this section represent the period of the movement – the turbulent sixties when individuals and organizations were rebelling against America’s culture of racism. During this time the author form words into poems that described, encouraged or aided the insurrection. This is how he was made to feel that he was a part of the movement by having it shape his thinking and his literature. This section contains poems expressed in aggressive petitions for black liberation and racial justice - the passionate radical flames of the author’s youth.
Author Horace Mungin has lived through much of the traumas and triumphs of the modern American experience and he offers his original opinions on it all. Truth & Absurdities contains his commentary on some of the events of the last half century of American history. Written from his personal point of view, many of the essays involves himself and his family as they encounter and react to unfolding floods of American realities; still the reader experiences his creative manner of expression and a chance to validate the truth in his keen observations about some of the absurdities of American society as he hilariously plugs us into them.
This book is both seriously profound and uproarious funny. Mungin expresses an appreciation for ethical behavior with a genuine candor and he dissects irrationalities with his own glowing brand of mockery – see what happens when he places Rush Limbaugh on the Jerry Springer Show, or when he uses the characters Amos ‘N Andy to explain the Obama senate seat fiasco that took place in Chicago and in Washington.
The author delivers his outrage at the irrationalities that has befallen (enough) white people since the election of Barack Obama as president with a modest delight. Through it all; from the over-eager terrorist fist-bump description given by Fox News anchor E. D. Hill to the incivility of the Bill O’Reilly interviews of Barack Obama, this book unmask the malaise of embroidered malarkey infecting much of middle America. Truth & Absurdities invites you to dine on appetizing particulars and drink in the intoxicating wine of reality
“…Or does it Explode” is a thrilling man-hunt historic murder mystery about what’s possible in a society that obstructs justice in favor of a false and temporary (400 years) sense of security.
The yearning for justice breeds vigilante revenge in an oddball group of black men experience in gun usage and military tactics who call themselves the Larry Davis Posse even as the press dubs them the Black Marble Vigilantes.
A fictional story based on events that have happened and events that have yet to happen, The FBI forms a task force to hunt down the cop killers before white mobs invade black communities nation-wide. There is a desperate race for time.
This story calls for the creation of an American law enforcement Truth and Reconciliation Commission to stop the police killing of unarmed black men and boys
The tale “Or Does It Explode” provides a powerful message from a Black Arts Movement era writer exhausted with all of the killings of innocent unarmed black men and boys – not just the recent rash of killings of 2013 to 2016 but all of the killings of more than the last half century.
The book is dedicated to Eleanor Bumpers, the emotionally disturbed elderly black woman shot gunned to death in 1984 by NYPD for being behind in her rent.
Come along on this anthropological urban dig through the ruins of 1950’s San Juan Hill. The author has landscaped the customs, language, and social habits of the people of a New York City community. 191 subjects of the Amsterdam community were sketched in poetic portraits that together tell their story and uncover the unique quality that exist among them; a quality that united them into a solid nurturing community.
This book is the second in a series of books reminiscent of Langston Hughes’ Jesse B. Simple” books. Sleepy Willie is an old Southern born, grass-roots Philosopher living in the south Bronx. Willie talks a pundit’s eye-view of the interactions of African Americans and whites in today’s society, but it doesn’t stop there, Willie also aims his blistering wit at politicians and urban gangsters alike. Willie’s got an international viewpoint and he finds socially redeeming qualities in the Jerry Springer show. Sleepy Willie’s whimsical flare and eccentric spins will amaze you each time they conclude within the realm of reasons. This is a funny, insightful and thought provoking book.
Sleepy Willie is an outgrowth of Langston Hughes’ character Jesse B. Simple and William (Sleepy Willie) Walker a real-life person the author grew around in the Amsterdam Projects in New York City. The author married Simples downhome folksiness to Sleepy Willie’s urban sagaciousness and came forth with a character who affords him the space for wide ranging quality satire.
This book is the first of the Sleepy Willie trilogy. The essays in this book are reprinted from the author’s syndicated newspaper column Sleepy Willie (1980 – ’86).
A rumble through the history of the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority that focuses on the decade of the sixties and seventies; a time when the work force changed from Irish-American to African-American and the struggle to control the leadership of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union. The ride is engrossing, witty, bumpy and on time
Is a collection of stories that could not have been written just a generation ago. Nearly all of the stories take place in a place called the New South with racial relationships that would have been unimaginable prior to the Civil Rights Movement. The laws that came about during the sixties proved that behavior can be changed through legislation. Racial tensions and inequalities still exist among the last generation of whites with a psychological need for white Privileges and the last generation of blacks who will tolerate the imbalances created by white privilege – in the New South these matters are confronted with a new attitude and it is this new assertiveness that colors the stories in this book.
