This is an excellent book and I highly recommend it.

This is the best book on Blake that I have read bar none. For an all around introduction to the prophetic language of this Romantic poet, there is no better source. More readable than Frye. More profound than Hilton. Makes a great Christmas gift for any Blake fans on your list.

Filled with lyrical prose, metaphors, similes, pen and ink illustrations and unforgettable adages you heard from your elders, Charlie L. Russell describes the life of the members in the community of the Quarters in rural Louisiana in The Worthy Ones. They work, play baseball, dance at The Say When, celebrate Juneteenth, worship at Mount Calvary Baptist Church and fall in love. When they have the misfortune of encountering a white person or run into the racist sheriff, they are stripped of their manhood/womanhood, as they have to bite their tongues and bow down while the "superior" ones degrade them.

The Pettiway and Johnson families are pillars of the community. Their children, James Pettiway and Mattie Johnson, play a cat and mouse game with love. When Mattie becomes pregnant they have to marry. They continue to reside in the community until James becomes fed up with the racism and its ramifications. His friend, St. Elmo, makes plans to flee the prejudice in the South and find work in the shipyards in California. James sees this plan as a way of making a new start and leaves with him for California,

Once Mattie and the children are on the train traveling to California to become reunited with James, the book takes a strange turn. On one page we read Mattie and the boys are on a train in St. Louis heading west. The next chapter starts in slavery times and proceeds though post Civil War. The Pettiway's family tree is presented from Caesar to Aaron Pettiway. While there were interesting historical facts about the Negro soldiers leading the fight at Port Hudson, I could not understand why the drastic change in the storyline, and why at this point in the book. Otherwise, while not much action, it was a good read about the residents of the Quarters and their day to day survival in a world that was against them.

Jeanette
APOOO BookClub

Russell goes back to 1928 to tell a story of the origin of love between Mattie Johnson and James Pettaway as they fashion their lives to get through the oppression of being black. Although no particular event marked a drawn out scenario, several examples of racism were exemplified. A breaking point was finally reached for many people of the black community that caused them to move away from the south.

The novel basically focused on 'normal everyday' events while smoothing several rhymes allegorically told by Mordecai, to assuage the spirits of many.

Russell evens takes the storyline back to the early 1860's to tie the relationship of the Pettaway family to the historical event, "The Assault on Port Hudson". Caesar Pettaway, James's grandfather, participated in that battle and realized although he and other blacks were fighting for the union, respect, fairness, and confidence remained undeserving in the white man's eye.

Although this story was told with a flow unswerved, a grand denouement was never met. However, the novel can be appreciated for its historical details.

This book was a great look back in time focusing on the hardships of African American families in the south, while remaining poetic and entertaining. You take a step back to Lena Horne movies and live performances from Muddy Waters singing Hoochie Coochie Man and Louis Armstrong doing West End Blues to slavery and the Civil War. The Worthy Ones is a touching, humorous novel filled with rich characters. The folklore, music and language make this an American classic. This is history filled with passion, hardship and triumph making The Worthy Ones a worthy read.

Only hard-core Clinton supporters need purchase this ridiculous diatribe. It is astonishing that Marvin Kalb actually pats himself on the back for personally witnessing, but not reporting, the scandalous behavior of JFK as president. Then, reasserting his liberal roots, he chastises today's press for reporting Clinton's disgusting behavior, which left a stain on more than the Oval Office carpet. What Mr. Kalb conveniently dismisses is that the "personal life" of any White House occupant becomes MY business as a citizen when it predisposes said occupant to potential BLACKMAIL and ensuing corruption. Any behavior which must be covered up because it is embarrassing or destructive to the office or the nation, should not be engaged in - period. It is frightening to think about the implications for this country if JFK were in office today. Reportedly, he liked to swim nude with several women in the White House pool, had a long-running sexual relationship with Judith Exner (the girlfriend of a major Mafia boss), had frequent rendevous with Marilyn Monroe, etc. - all while married to Jackie, of course. With today's advances in espionage and the tight- wire act required to placate rogue nations, we need every break we can get. JFK was a prime target for blackmail, as was Clinton with his "mentoring" sessions with Lewinsky and his late-night phone sex calls on an unsecured line! It is the press's responsibility to report to the people any blatantly out-of-control politician, particularly the president. If politicians disagree, let them ply their "personal lives" elsewhere.

Well, Marvin baby tries to do a good job. Unfortunately somewhere he lost his way. I simply did not understand the point he was trying to make. In one way I thought it was a "mea culpa" for Clinton, and in another way it was in regards to how trashy news reporting has become. Maybe it was both, but definitely trying to make heads or tails of this book is challenging. That he started with his episode with Kennedy didn't help his thesis one bit. He mixed apples and oranges and ended up with kiwis -- and I'm not sure yet if they are fruit or vegetable. That's the way I feel about this book too.

The first thing to understand about ONE SCANDALOUS STORY is that it is itself a story. Marvin Kalb is an excellent storyteller. A seasoned journalist and professor, Kalb is expert in taking information and presenting it in an interesting and compelling way. He succeeds in doing that here, which is no small accomplishment as, at first blush, there's not much more to be said about the Clinton-Lewinsky story. Beyond the way her writes, Kalb does add a new, or at least neglected wrinkle, which is the scandal of how the story was covered.

Kalb's dissection of journalism's treatment of the unfolding drama in its earliest days is what this book is really about. Kalb explains early on that he was looking for a subject to use as the centerpiece of a discussion about a number of observations he's made over his career about the impact of the press on public policy, how television affects politics and related topics. As the name of the book implies, the developments over the past 30 years, culminating in the Clinton-Lewinsky story, are not good.

Kalb's account explains how coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky story drove the sequence of events. He demonstrates how poor sources, reporting of rumor, and saturation coverage magnified the significance of what was actually happening. Kalb does not justify Bill Clinton's bad behavior, but he makes the point that coverage of that behavior was all out of proportion to what else was going on in the world - and how that coverage wasn't very good anyway. (An interesting "other" development was the US-Iraq showdown of 1998. The thought occurred to me that the Clinton-Lewinsky story could have derailed the American public's preparedness for a larger confrontation - sort of a reverse 'wag the dog' phenomena.)

Kalb is at his very best when he picks apart specific reports and bring a magnifying glass to the transcript of actual stories covering the Clinton-Lewinsky tale. My only criticism of this book is that there isn't enough of that. Where ONE SCANDALOUS STORY replays what happened between Clinton, Lewinsky, Ken Starr, etc. it takes away from its exploration of how the story was actually covered.

I also don't think that the end of ONE SCANDALOUS STORY is the end of the story. If coverage of Clinton-Lewinsky represented the culmination of the press's degeneration, it also hastened the subsequent further decline. Coverage of the 2000 election results, if anything, one-upped Clinton-Lewinsky in terms of bad journalism, and in a different but important way, coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq represented the complete meltdown of the kinds of journalistic standards Kalb is so concerned with.

Hopefully, Kalb is thinking along the same lines and another book is forthcoming. His point is too important to be made once.