Judy Smith: Good Self, Bad Self

“Well, let me just say that I think Shonda Rhimes has done a terrific job at really dramatizing the sort of fast-paced, crisis-driven life that we lead every day. And, of course, it’s television, so it is much more sexier and exciting than my everyday life.”

Judy Smith, the real life version of Scandal’s Olivia Pope, published a book last year. And based on the summary, who better to write such a book? More below:

They found out. It’s not working . They won’t listen. It’s all over. Now what? Whether the problem is debt, infidelity, indiscretion, or merely an embarrassing email sent to the wrong reader, we have all found ourselves in bad situations of our own making. And whether that puts you in a delicate position or a full-blown crisis, it can sometimes feel as if there is no way out. Enter Judy Smith. America’s number one crisis management expert, Judy Smith is on speed dial for some of the highest-profile celebrities, politicians, and corporations in the world. But though her business is helping her clients recover from widely publicized personal and professional setbacks, her expertise is applicable to us all. In Good Self, Bad Self, Smith shares her methods, gleaned from years of professional experience, for smoothing over a bad situation while providing the tools to prevent similar incidents from ever happening again.

Smith uses examples from high-profile cases to illustrate how celebrities, businesses, and individuals have become victims of their own bad behavior when they let one of these traits fall out of balance. Exploring the underlying factors of some very public and often unpleasant scandals, Smith shows how different situations could have been prevented by re-calibrating one (or more) of those seven vital characteristics. As she shares her method of repairing the damage that these situations can cause, Smith also explains what we can all be doing in our own lives to prevent a crisis from getting started. Nobody’s perfect, and the same character traits that bring us success can lead to our downfall. It is the way each of us deals with personal character flaws that dictates whether we’re going to succeed or fail. In Good Self, Bad Self, Judy Smith distills years of experience to share the tools we all need to face our mistakes and ultimately overcome them. (Read more . . . )

I saw a few photos from a book signing and assumed this book was recently published. Upon further research, I realized that I overlooked a mention of the book in Essence magazine and on several other sites. Maybe you’ll consider adding it to your list.

Happy reading, y’all.

Wednesday Wisdom: Langston Hughes

“Folks, I’m telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean-
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.”

- Selected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes

Zane: Black Erotica

A friend of mine loves to read erotica. She sometimes talks to me about the 50 Shades trilogy and other novels she’s enjoyed. At a recent lunch, we giggled over a few shared passages from her current read. But as I told her, I just don’t read erotica. Typically, my eyes glaze over and I zone out when I get to the sex scenes. I’m definitely not a prude, but I just don’t need sex on every other page to drive my reading—or to drive a story in general.

I asked my friend if she’s ever read any urban or black erotica. I also questioned if she’d ever heard of Zane. She replied no to both questions. If we weren’t in China, I’d love to hand her a few titles just to hear her thoughts. I don’t think she knows that according to Time magazine:

When it comes to bestselling erotica, Zane has been a trailblazer. The 44-year-old, Washington, D.C.–based author had sold more than 5 million copies of her books worldwide before anyone had heard of  Fifty Shades of Grey. While E.L. James, the author of the latter book, dropped an atom bomb this year on the competition (30 million copies sold worldwide in four months), Zane was indisputably there first. She is known as the queen of urban erotica, famous for its no-holds-barred, raw sexuality, juicier even than more restrained-by-comparison books such as Fifty Shades, a genre which has been labeled as “Mommy Porn” by critics. (Read more . . . )

Personally, I’ve only read 2 books by Zane and that was some time ago. If you’ve never picked up a Zane novel—for whatever reason—here’s an excerpt from one that I found on her blog. This is not appropriate for some blog readers:

. . .Less than twenty‐five minutes later, I was sitting in the parking lot at Baker’s Creek Park. That’s the beauty of small‐town life. You could shower, get dressed—oh yeah, take a morning shit—and still be anyplace in town within a half hour.

There wasn’t a soul out there that time of morning. It wasn’t like Central Park or South Beach or the Santa Monica Pier or the other places they showed in movies. People weren’t riding bikes, jogging in expensive spandex, or rollerblading at Baker’s Creek. The only things getting exercise around there were the squirrels, possums, and raccoons. And shortly, my pussy was going to get a workout.

My clit started throbbing at the thought of it. I tried to decide what I was going to demand that Phil do to me first: suckle on my tits, eat my pussy, or lick my ass. Yes, my ass. I showered after my morning shit. Did you? (Read more . . .)

I know there are numerous Zane fans out there. Obviously so if she’s a best-selling author. Again, I just don’t get into erotica and I tend to shy away from “urban /street fiction.” But to each his own. Maybe I’ll read something by Zane soon just to stay in the know. Especially after watching the interview above. I just wouldn’t even know where to begin. Keep doing your thing, Zane.

Happy reading, y’all.

How to Be Black: Baratunde Talks Ethnic Names

My name seems simple enough—to me anyway. Trenee. My mother simply added a letter to her own name and there you have it. Her version of junior, but for a girl. Growing up, I’ve heard people add extra letters, abbreviate it, make mama seem ignorant, or totally butcher it. A few examples of this include, Trebay, Treneshalay, Treneeka, Trini, and the dreaded Tra-nay-nay.  How to be Black author Baratunde Thurston feels my pain. He knows what it’s like to have people act like your name is too hard to remember or it’s too ethnic. Again, like Thurston, in classrooms and public spaces when my name is called, I always recognize the strange face and lip contortions as people attempt to say my 6-letter name—three vowels and an accent. Renee with a T. That’s all.

This excerpt from How to Be Black really hits home for me. Thurston shares my exact name-game story. I hope a few others out there will relate:

Chapter One: Where Did You Get That Name?

Barry. Barrington. Baracuda. Bartuna. Bartender. Bartunda. Bartholomew. Bart. Baritone. Baritone Dave. Baranthunde. Bar—. Brad.

This is a representative sample of the world’s attempts to say or recreate my name. For the record, it’s Baratunde (baa-ruh-TOON-day).

I’ve trained for decades in the art of patiently waiting for people to butcher my name. It’s often a teacher or customer service official who has to read aloud from a list. I listen to them breeze through Daniel and Jennifer and even Dwayne, but inevitably, there’s a break in their rhythm. “James! Carrie! Karima! Stephanie! Kevin!” Pause. “Bar—.” Pause. They look around the room, and then look back at their list. Their confidence falters.The declarative tone applied to the names before mine gives way to a weak, interrogative stumbling:

Barry? Barrington? Baracuda? Bartuna? Bartender? Bar-tunda? Bartholomew? Bart? Baritone? Baritone Dave? Baranthunde? Bar—? Brad!!

The person who called me Brad was engaged in the most lazy and hilarious form of wishful thinking, but all the others kind of, sort of, maybe make some sense. This experience is so common in my life that I now entirely look forward to it. Like a child on Christmas morning who hasn’t yet been told that Santa is a creation of consumer culture maintained by society to extend the myth of “economic growth,” I eagerly await the gift of any new variation the next person will invent. Can I get a Beelzebub? Who will see a Q where none exists? How about some numbers or special characters? Can I get a hyphen, underscore, forward slash? Only after letting the awkward process run its public course do I step forward, volunteering myself as the bearer of the unpronounceable label and correct them: “That’s me. It’s Baratunde.”

I love my name. I love people’s attempts to say it. I love that everyone, especially white people, wants to know what it means. So here’s the answer:

My full name is Baratunde Rafiq Thurston. It’s got a nice flow. It’s global. I like to joke that “Baratunde” is a Nigerian name that means “one with no nickname.” “Rafiq” is Arabic for “really, no nickname,” and “Thurston” is a British name that means “property of Massa Thurston.” (Read more . . . )

Happy reading, y’all.

Happy Thanksgiving: Soul Food Books

Well, I don’t get to enjoy the usual Thanksgiving fare here in China, but at least I can talk about a few books that deal with good food from the African American community. These are a few of the titles that were referenced in my current read, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens. These aren’t cookbooks, but rather, books on why African Americans eat the food we eat and the cultural impacts of such cuisines. So, hold on to that turkey leg and read a few summaries:

Acclaimed cookbook author Jessica B. Harris has spent much of her life researching the food and foodways of the African Diaspora. High on the Hog is the culmination of years of her work, and the result is a most engaging history of African American cuisine. Harris takes the reader on a harrowing journey from Africa across the Atlantic to America, tracking the trials that the people and the food have undergone along the way. From chitlins and ham hocks to fried chicken and vegan soul, Harris celebrates the delicious and restorative foods of the African American experience and details how each came to form such an important part of African American culture, history, and identity. Although the story of African cuisine in America begins with slavery, High on the Hog ultimately chronicles a thrilling history of triumph and survival. The work of a masterful storyteller and an acclaimed scholar, Jessica B. Harris’s High on the Hog fills an important gap in our culinary history.

In 1889, the owners of a pancake mix witnessed the vaudeville performance of a white man in blackface and drag playing a character called Aunt Jemima. This character went on to become one of the most pervasive stereotypes of black women in the United States, embodying not only the pancakes she was appropriated to market but also post-Civil War race and gender hierarchies–including the subordination of African American women as servants and white fantasies of the nurturing mammy. Using the history of Aunt Jemima as a springboard for exploring the relationship between food and African Americans, “Black Hunger focuses on debates over soul food since the 1960s to illuminate a complex web of political, economic, religious, sexual, and racial tensions between whites and blacks and within the black community itself. Celebrated by many African Americans as a sacramental emblem of slavery and protest, soul food was simultaneously rejected by others as a manifestation of middle-class black “slumming.”

Frederick Douglass Opie deconstructs and compares the foodways of people of African descent throughout the Americas, interprets the health legacies of black culinary traditions, and explains the concept of soul itself, revealing soul food to be an amalgamation of West and Central African social and cultural influences as well as the adaptations blacks made to the conditions of slavery and freedom in the Americas. Sampling from travel accounts, periodicals, government reports on food and diet, and interviews with more than thirty people born before 1945, Opie reconstructs an interrelated history of Moorish influence on the Iberian Peninsula, the African slave trade, slavery in the Americas, the emergence of Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. His grassroots approach reveals the global origins of soul food, the forces that shaped its development, and the distinctive cultural collaborations that occurred among Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Americans throughout history. Opie shows how food can be an indicator of social position, a site of community building and cultural identity, and a juncture at which different cultural traditions can develop and impact the collective health of a community.

Happy Thanksgiving reading, y’all!

Tuesday Teaser: Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens

As people in the States prepare to greedily gobble down delicious delights, I’m currently reading about the women who use to make such possible inside other people’s kitchens year round. No, this isn’t the book that inspired The Help. I’d say this non-fiction read is something more scholarly. Here’s a Tuesday Teaser:

Cooks who did not wish to give away their recipes might give incorrect proportions or directions to people who pushed them. White cookbook writer Marion Flexner told of a family cook named Molly, whom Flexner’s aunt tried to beg for the recipe for her “famous Shredded Apple Pie.” Molly gave her a recipe with ingredients left out and incorrect proportions. Flexner asked Molly why she didn’t give away the recipe and reported Molly’s response in dialect: ‘Lissen chile,’ she said seriously, shaking her finger at me, ‘dat pie is ma specialty—see? Effen Ah gives my receipts to everybody what axes for ‘em, what Ah gwine ter hafe lef’ ter surprise ‘em wid?’ She put her hand kindly on her arm. ‘Ah’ll give you a piece of advice from an ol’ woman—always keep sumpin’ in reserve what you kin do better’n ennybody else, and don’ share dat secret wid no one.’ Molly realized she had created a very special dish, and she wanted to continue to use that creation for her own advantage.

Happy reading, y’all.

Yes, Chef & The Good Food Revolution

“A hundred years ago black men and women had to fight to get out of the kitchen. These days, we have to fight to get in.” – Marcus Samuelsson

Since it’s election time, you might recall Marcus Samuelsson for his role as guest chef at the first state dinner for the Obama presidency. This year Samuelsson published his well-received memoir titled Yes, Chef. The book describes his rise from Ethiopian orphan to world-renowned chef and the many failures and successes he’s experienced along the way. But Yes, Chef isn’t Samuelsson’s first publication. He’s also the author of several cookbooks on African, Scandinavian, and American cuisines.

In Good Food Revolution, Will Allen also shares his personal food journey and what led him from basketball courts and executive boardrooms to becoming a trailblazer in urban farming. To his credit, Allen also founded Growing Power, an organization which not only produces community farmed foods, but also educates, develops, and supports a number of positive community efforts.

If books by men of African descent and their passions for food are of interest to you, grab your spatula and take a flip through these books:

Yes, Chef: A Memoir
by Marcus Samuelsson

Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his mother, and his sister—all battling tuberculosis—walked seventy-five miles to a hospital in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Adaba. Tragically, his mother succumbed to the disease shortly after she arrived, but Marcus and his sister recovered, and one year later they were welcomed into a loving middle-class white family in Göteborg, Sweden. It was there that Marcus’s new grandmother, Helga, sparked in him a lifelong passion for food and cooking with her pan-fried herring, her freshly baked bread, and her signature roast chicken. From a very early age, there was little question what Marcus was going to be when he grew up. Yes, Chef chronicles Marcus Samuelsson’s remarkable journey from Helga’s humble kitchen to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, from his grueling stints on cruise ships to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four. But Samuelsson’s career of  “chasing flavors,” as he calls it, had only just begun—in the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs and, most important, the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem. At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fufilled his dream of creating a truly diverse, multiracial dining room—a place where presidents and prime ministers rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, bus drivers, and nurses. It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home.

The Good Food Revolution
by Will Allen

The son of a sharecropper, Will Allen had no intention of ever becoming a farmer himself. But after years in professional basketball and as an executive for Kentucky Fried Chicken and Procter & Gamble, Allen cashed in his retirement fund for a two-acre plot a half mile away from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project. The area was a food desert with only convenience stores and fast-food restaurants to serve the needs of local residents. In the face of financial challenges and daunting odds, Allen built the country’s preeminent urban farm—a food and educational center that now produces enough vegetables and fish year-round to feed thousands of people. Employing young people from the neighboring housing project and community, Growing Power has sought to prove that local food systems can help troubled youths, dismantle racism, create jobs, bring urban and rural communities closer together, and improve public health. Today, Allen’s organization helps develop community food systems across the country. An eco-classic in the making, The Good Food Revolution is the story of Will’s personal journey, the lives he has touched, and a grassroots movement that is changing the way our nation eats.

Happy reading, y’all.