By Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.
The year 1989 was the pivot point in moving the world from one era to the next. It was a year of cascading changes that introduced the world’s nations and peoples to a new arrangement of global forces and relationships- the complex of issues and circumstances we are grappling with today.

By Jay Mathews
This year, David Levin and his friend Mike Feinberg are close to becoming the most famous teachers in the country. They have founded the nation’s most successful network of public charter schools, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP).

By Imani Perry
Sag Harbor is the first-person narrative of teenaged Benji Cooper and his relationship to the place and people of his summers: Sag Harbor, New York.

By Stacey Patton
Some years ago, I was a personal fitness trainer at the New York Sports Clubs Sheridan Square location at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 12th Street. One evening, a well-scrubbed young gay white guy named Alan meandered into the free weights section with bad posture, low eyes, and all kinds of insecurities shut up in his bones.

By Farah Jasmine Griffin
An exquisite jewel of a book, Paule Marshall’s memoir, Triangular Road, is a welcome work of nonfiction by one of our greatest writers. Neither tell-all nor confessional, Triangular Road does tell the story of a writer in motion, a self-described “traveling woman,” one who has devoted her life to creating complexly rendered novels and stories about the historical, psychological and political dimensions of the African Diaspora.

By Pamela Newkirk
The fleeting tradition of letter writing was in part the inspiration for Letters from Black America, a collection of more than 200 letters that traces the footprints, large and small, of a people from bondage to self-determination; from the Civil War to the War in Iraq; and from dusty plantations to the glistening White House.

By The Editors
The first wave of what will undoubtedly be a flood of books exploring what propelled Barack Obama to his historic victory have now come rushing from the printing presses. Taken together, they seem to mark the likely boundaries of the territory those that follow them will traverse.

The new book, Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs, 150 photos culled from thousands by photo historian, curator, and photographer Deborah Willis, with text by Washington Post Associate Editor Kevin Merida, provides a thoughtful bouquet of these images as a tribute to change-in-motion and history in the age of instant information and communications.

By Farah Jasmine Griffin
With her latest offering, A Mercy, Toni Morrison creates a world populated by exciting and complicated characters of every race. It is a tale about the part of North America that would become the United States. A place where a white, teenaged bride is befriended by Native American servant who, in turn adopts and loves a little black girl, brought to them by a man who masters them all.

By TaRessa Stovall:
In the late 1960s, my teenaged mind was “blown,” as we used to say, by two books that validated my thoughts and feelings, provided a larger context in which to consider my observations and experiences, and gave me invaluable tools with which to make sense of the collision of the Civil Rights and [...]