Blending memoir, essay, and political analysis, the first African American writer at the Washington Post's sunday magazine takes a look at what it takes to grow up Black and female in the United States - (Baker & Taylor)

Blending memoir, essay, and political analysis, the first African-American writer at The Washington Post's Sunday magazine takes a look at what it takes to grow black and female in the United States. 35,000 first printing. Tour. - (Baker & Taylor)

Booklist Reviews

/*Starred Review*/ Secrets, silence, and invisibility define African American women's lives, urges Nelson, whose Volunteer Slavery (1993) traced her years as the first black female staffer at the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. In Straight, No Chaser, she uses memoir to illuminate the movements, ideologies, and conventional wisdom of the past several decades, with pungent comments on leaders and events (e.g., Roy Innis, Louis Farrakhan, Reverend Al Sharpton, the Million Man March) and a heartfelt call for African American women to define themselves in defiance of white politicians' stereotypes and of demands to protect black male egos. Nelson's rage--"[This] culture . . . despises women and black people most of all. I am a two-fer in American hell" --is matched by hope: "We need to stop lying . . . and honestly examine our real lives as women: our secondary status, the political, economic, and sometimes personal violence we live with, the aspirations . . . so often subsumed by the needs of others. If we do this, we can begin to develop new ideas of what it means to be a black woman." To be serialized in Essence and promoted in a 12-city author tour, so expect interest. ((Reviewed July 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews