Black Women’s History Month: A New Book Review
One thing I have been doing this semester is creating display boards that feature a specific subselection of the HPNL’s New Book Collection. In February, I did a display on Black History Month, in March, I did a display on Women’s History Month, and now, for April, it’s time to combine all of that for a new display on Black Women’s History Month. As the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library is also the African-American reference center, we have a ton of books for me to choose from to go on this display. As April is also National Stress Month, I wanted to get into something mental health-related, as stress has such an impact on a person’s mental health every day. So, I chose to find a book on mental health specifically relating to black women for this article.
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Alan Burns came from one of those families where the children all seem to have been remarkable (in personality or intellect), consequential, and ideologically irreconcilable. The Last Imperialist by Bruce Gilley might have been a nuanced study of one such family (like those captivating Mitford biographies—I think there have been almost a dozen so far). Or it could have been about the devout Roman Catholic and Anglo West Indian, from birth an establishment outsider, who made it his life mission to defend the very establishment that had rejected him. Instead, Gilley chose to write an improbable apologia of the British Empire, and while he does fold some biography into the polemic, he’s so entirely united with Burns in admiration for colonialism that the book devolves into pure encomium somewhere around page three.