the book itch freedom truth and harlem's greatest bookstore

While middle-graders might need some context to understand that the book is set fifty years in the past, its concerns remain: as Michaux “jokes” to Lewis, “Anytime more than three black people congregate, the police get nervous.” Nelson provides full documentation in a biographical note, and some of the bookseller’s best slogans decorate the endpapers.įrom the November/December 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. Christie, whose black-and-white drawings are such an inextricable part of No Crystal Stair, is here allowed full pages drenched with expressionistic color to convey the spirit of the place, time, and people. Studded with Michaux’s aphorisms (“Don’t get took! Read a book!”), the book successfully conveys the vibrancy of the bookstore and its habitués, including Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, whose assassination provides the emotional climax of the story. Where No Crystal Stair had more than thirty narrators, this book has but one, Michaux’s young son Lewis, a late-in-life child who witnessed the store’s doings during the tumultuous 1960s. The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth & Harlem’s Greatest Bookstore by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, illustrated by R. This book title, The Book Itch (Freedom, Truth & Harlems Greatest Bookstore), ISBN: 9780761339434, by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, R.

3/12) was the author’s great-uncle, Lewis Michaux, this picture book adaptation of the same source material shifts the focus just enough to give younger readers an introduction to his singular achievement: the National Memorial African Bookstore, founded by Michaux in Harlem in the 1930s. If the central character of Nelson’s Boston Globe–Horn Book Award-winning No Crystal Stair (rev. How to scratch it He started a bookstore in Harlem.

In the 1930s, Lewis's dad had an itch he needed to scratch: a book itch. Author: Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, Illustrator: R. The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth & Harlem’s Greatest Bookstoreīy Vaunda Micheaux Nelson illus. The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth & Harlem's Greatest Bookstore.

The book itch freedom truth and harlem's greatest bookstore