Reconnecting to the Wonder ...

"People need stories more than bread itself. They tell us how to live--and why." This is an observation the Master Storyteller shares with Scherazade, the queen who saves her life by spinning 1001 spellbinding tales, in the recent TV adaptation of Arabian Nights, the enduring classic of world literature. Here is a truth that has resonated with me as I have been frenetically juggle many blessings, but also learn to live with real and impending personal losses. I haven't had much time to read--at least, not at length nor at my leisure for either pure pleasure or simple sustenance.

But I managed to spend the a weekend alone with a substantial and daring first novel: In White Teeth, a precocious epic by 24-year-old Afro-British writer Zadie Smith (Random House, $24.95, ISBN 0-375-50185-1, published in May), I found not only wry laughter, but wisdom and restoration. The story is anchored in the multicultural mix of present-day London through the sagas of two families. Their patriarchs are best friends from disparate backgrounds--a white working-class Brit and a Bengali Muslim immigrant--initially brought together in a World War II tank unit, but ultimately bonded by their entangled post-war family lives, each marrying much younger wives during their own middle years. We've assigned a more considered review of this remarkable book for our next issue when BIBR speaks with Zadie Smith, now in the throes of her stateside book tour. But I couldn't let our July/August edition go to press without sharing the excitement of my first great read of the summer!

Discovery and magic are part of what a good book opens up to its readers, as author Rosemarie Robotham's young son reminds us in her thoughtful account of his gleeful encounters with the Harry Potter series. BIBR remains dedicated to being your authoritative source on books from black culture, but we will always acknowledge and affirm how adventurous and curious black readers are about worlds beyond our own immediate neighborhoods and cultures, and we are also as individually distinctive in our tastes as any other group, if not more so. In fact, grounded by our own stories and valuing the gifts of our own culture, we are all the better equipped to appreciate narratives that originate from many sources.

But the gospel of good black books and important black voices remains our first mission; hence, our cover spotlight on social commentator and author Michael Eric Dyson, author of the interpretive biography I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr., paired with Ralph Wiley's improvisatory meditation on this generation of black male nonfiction authhors, "Brothers on a Soapbox. Most of all, there are BIBR's pages of black-interest book reviews, certainly a source of a variety of great reads for the summer and ever after. May you also reconnect to the wonder.

SUSAN McHENRY BIBR Executive Editor