“It wasn’t a compliment,” says the writer, whose latest novel is “Someone Else’s Shoes.” “My weekly visits to her were usually spent with my nose buried between the pages.”
He wrote tens of thousands of jokes in his career. Among those who told them were Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton — and, for a while, President Gerald R. Ford.
In “The Declassification Engine,” Matthew Connelly traces the evolution of America’s obsession with secrecy and the alarming implications for our understanding of the past.
In midcareer, having worked for the biggest agencies, he quit to conjure up best sellers about a British spy named Alex Hawke, who was likened to James Bond.
One of the best-known Black poets of the 19th century, she was also a renowned orator who spoke about the rights of women and formerly enslaved people.
The stories in Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s “When Trying to Return Home” range from present-day Puerto Rico to St. Louis in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education.
Barbara Brandon-Croft’s series “Where I’m Coming From” was the first by a Black female cartoonist to be picked up by a major national syndicate. Her strips, now collected in a book, got plenty right about how we still live today.