Book of the Month

Dancing During the Storm is a collection of stories from projects that I have written over the years.  They represent a desire to praise God despite the storms in my life. As the saying goes, you are going into a storm, in the middle of a storm or coming out of a storm.  All of these stories tell of people who enjoy the life that God has given them and live it to the fullest.  Each character has a storm in their life which they are going into, in the midst of, or coming out of.

The first story is about the first man to ever encounter a storm and the impact on his life. 

The second story is about a court case that changed the lives of three of the women involved.  A Victim. A Juror. A Judge. The impact of the trial changed their thinking, yet prepared them for all that life threw at them.

The third and fourth story is a science fiction tale of the journey of a young woman who searched for peace and quiet after spending the last two years on a planet that had to resemble hell. As she emerged from the storms of her life, she saw that things were not as easy as she thought they would be.

The fifth story is another science fiction story that showed a divided world on the brink of war and two women meet to decide the fate of all the women on the planet. This meeting determined if it would either draw everyone together or increase the divide.  Would it be treason or slavery?

The sixth story two bullets changed the life of a man who had cruised through life on the back of rich parents and affluence.

Enjoy these fun, thought provoking stories, and hear the underlying intent.

You can purchase these at Amazon.com  and Books2read.com

Art of the Month

Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker (3 June 1906 – 12 April 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant.

She was born in St Louis, Missouri, as Freda Josephine McDonald where she had a very rough beginning. She dropped out of school at age 12 and had two failed marriages at ages 13 and 15.  Then she joined a vaudeville troupe that took her to New York City. She later became part of a show, Shuffle Along in the chorus line. This would be one of the first steps to her success. She joined the cast in the chorus.

She used comedy to make herself stand out in the chorus line, and later launch a career that sent her overseas because prejudice limited what she could accomplish in the United States. In Paris she became a success which led to a career that spanned all over Europe.  Some have called her the first Beyonce in that she starred in theater and movies in France and became a standout star.

She did not limit her life to performance, during World War II she became a spy for the French Resistance and later received a medal for her work. In the 1950s became active in the Civil Rights Movement traveling throughout the southern part of the United States. Ever the humanitarian, she also adopted 12 children from around the world and raise them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Baker

Art of the Month

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, an autobiography, ethnographies, and many essays.

Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories. In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research as a scholar at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community’s identity.

She also wrote about contemporary issues in the black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as The New Negro and Fire!! After moving back to Florida, Hurston wrote and published her literary anthology on African-American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (1935), and her first three novels: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Also published during this time was Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.

Hurston traveled extensively in the Caribbean and the American South and immersed herself in local cultural practices to conduct her anthropological research.

In 1935, Hurston traveled to Georgia and Florida for research on African-American song traditions and their relationship to slave and African antecedent music. In 1936 and 1937, Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti for research, with support from the Guggenheim Foundation. She drew from this research for Tell My Horse (1938), a genre-defying book that mixes anthropology, folklore, and personal narrative.

Her nonfiction book, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was published in 2018. It is the story of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zora_Neale_Hurston

Art of the Month

Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone (August 9, 1877 – May 10, 1957) was an American businesswoman, inventor and philanthropist. She is considered to be one of the first African American women to become a millionaire. In the first three decades of the 20th century, she founded and developed a large and prominent commercial and educational enterprise centered on cosmetics for African-American women.

She was born in Metropolis, Illinois, the daughter of Robert and Isabella Turnbo, who had formerly been enslaved. Orphaned at a young age, Annie attended a public school in Metropolis, before moving in 1896 to live with her older sister Ada Moody in Peoria. There Turnbo attended high school, taking a particular interest in chemistry. However, due to frequent illness, she was forced to withdraw from classes.

While out of school, Turnbo grew so fascinated with hair and hair care that she often practiced hairdressing with her sister. With expertise in both chemistry and hair care, Turnbo began to develop her own hair-care products.

While experimenting with hair and different hair-care products, she developed and manufactured her own line of non-damaging hair straighteners, special oils, and hair-stimulant products for African-American women. She named her new product “Wonderful Hair Grower”. To promote her new product, Turnbo sold the Wonderful Hair Grower in bottles door-to-door. Her products and sales began to revolutionize hair-care methods for all African Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Turnbo_Malone

Book of the Quarter

Privateers

A single young woman is tricked by modern day pirates losing everything she owned. As she tries to figure out what happened to her belongings, her world crashes around her as government and private agencies treat her as a suspect. Determined to find the man who did this to her, she stumbles onto a government top secret. Finding this modern-day pirate turns into a race against lethal forces.

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