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Oldest Living Tulsa Race Massacre Survivor Publishes Memoir
At the age of 109, Viola Ford Fletcher has published a memoir about growing up during the Tulsa Race Massacre. Don’t Let Them Bury My Story is being published by a small press and will be available widely beginning August 15. Fletcher has been an activist for accountability over the incident, wherein a white mob destroyed the thriving Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and left between dozens and thousands dead. Fletcher’s age does not deter her — she remained quiet until she was much older, for fear of retribution. “Now that I’m an old lady, there’s nothing else to talk about,” Fletcher said. “We decided to do a book about it and maybe that would help.”
The Death of Sports Books
It’s been over 20 years since the mega-bestselling book Moneyball and close to 20 years since The Blind Side. But in that time, there’s hardly been as big a book focused on sports. Did sports books lose their power thanks to shifting sports media? “In the past, a popular sports book could cement an athlete’s legacy for the next generation of fans. Today, a documentary is more likely to hold that power, which complicates matters for sportswriters.”
The Highest-Rated Book in Each Country, Mapped
Okay, geography nerds: here’s one for you. It’s a map of the highest-rated books in each of the 130 countries. The researchers behind this one looked at the top-rated authors in each country, then drilled down to identify via Goodreads their highest-rated titles. The U.S.? Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. Among the rest of the world, Los Fantasmas De Fernando by Jaime Alfonso Sandoval is the top spot in Mexico, and Frizzy by Claribel Ortega hits the top in the Dominican Republic.
Who Was Tessa Kelso? A Feminist History of the Librarian Pioneer
Tessa Kelso would only be Los Angeles city librarian for six years, but the changes she made were gigantic. Even eight months into her tenure, the board of governors of the library were sending praise to Kelso and her co-worker and right-hand-woman Adelaide Hasse. Under their tenure, the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) collection grew seven times bigger and circulation went from 12,000 to 330,000. The changes LAPL made under Kelso would attract national attention and were at the forefront of what libraries would move towards in the future.