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From its launch in 1945, Ebony magazine was politically and socially influential. However, the magazine also played an important role in educating millions of African Americans about their past. Guided by the pen of Lerone Bennett Jr., the magazine’s senior editor and in-house historian, Ebony became a key voice in the popular black history revival that flourished after World War II. Its content helped push representations of the African American past from the margins to the center of the nation’s cultural and political imagination.

E. James West's fresh and fascinating exploration of Ebony’s political, social, and historical content illuminates the intellectual role of the iconic magazine and its contribution to African American scholarship. He also uncovers a paradox. Though Ebony provided Bennett with space to promote a militant reading of black history and protest, the magazine’s status as a consumer publication helped to mediate its representation of African American identity in both past and present.

Mixing biography, cultural history, and popular memory, West restores Ebony and Bennett to their rightful place in African American intellectual, commercial, and political history.

This is a stellar, courageous work of investigative journalism and historical scholarship—grippingly told, meticulously documented, and doggedly pursued over thirty years. Tracking a Cold War confrontation that has compromised the national interests of both Mexico and the United States, Eclipse of the Assassins exposes deadly connections among historical events usually remembered as isolated episodes.
            Authors Russell and Sylvia Bartley shed new light on the U.S.-instigated “dirty wars” that ravaged all of Latin America in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s and reveal—for the first time—how Mexican officials colluded with Washington in its proxy contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. They draw together the strands of a clandestine web linking:

• the assassination of prominent Mexican journalist Manuel Buendía
• the torture and murder of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena
• the Iran-Contra scandal
• a major DEA sting against key CIA-linked Bolivian, Panamanian, and Mexican drug traffickers
• CIA-orchestrated suppression of investigative journalists
• criminal collusion of successive U.S. and Mexican administrations that has resulted in the unprecedented power of drug kingpins like “El Chapo” Guzmán.

            Eclipse of the Assassins places a major political crime—the murder of Buendía—in its full historical perspective and shows how the dirty wars of the past are still claiming victims today.

Best books for public & secondary school libraries from university presses, American Library Association

In late summer 1953, as he returned to Mexico City after a seven-month expedition through the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, William Burroughs began a notebook of final reflections on his four years in Latin America. His first novel, Junkie, had just been published and he would soon be back in New York to meet Allen Ginsberg and together complete the manuscripts of what became The Yage Letters and Queer. Yet this notebook, the sole survivor from that period, reveals Burroughs not as a writer on the verge of success, but as a man staring down personal catastrophe and visions of looming cultural disaster.

Losses that will not let go of him haunt Burroughs throughout the notebook: “Bits of it keep floating back to me like memories of a daytime nightmare.” However, out of these dark reflections we see emerge vivid fragments of Burroughs’ fiction and, even more tellingly, unique, primary evidence for the remarkable ways in which his early manuscripts evolved. Assembled in facsimile and transcribed by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, the notebook forces us to change the way we see both Burroughs and his writing at a turning point in his literary career.

Christine Brennan, the USA Today sports columnist, author, and commentator, uses her voice to advocate for diversity and equality in the world of sports, and her wisdom to encourage future journalists. Her passion for sports was sparked by her dad, who encouraged her to participate in athletics and, as he said, “smell the game”—go watch baseball and football games together.

As a child, Christine wrote daily entries in her diary and listened to play-by-play coverage on her radio. She pursued this love of words through journalism school and applied her passion for sports by reporting on them for various newspapers. Since then, she has portrayed the setbacks and triumphs of athletes, all the while fighting her own battles for success—and respect—as a female journalist.

From knocking down barriers in NFL locker rooms to covering every Olympics since 1984 to being the go-to commentator whenever scandal occurs in the sports world, Christine Brennan has done it all. Eye to Eye invites young readers to learn more about this remarkable journalist and perhaps to nurture their own dreams of investigating and telling important stories.