Posts

Showing posts from June, 2017

Book Review: Amber and the Hidden City

Image
I've been collecting a stack of fiction that centrally features black characters, so after spinning around with my eyes closed and picking one at random, I started with reading  Amber and the Hidden City .  The book is a fantasy adventure story by  African-American  author Milton J. Davis, centered around the titular character. Amber is a 13 year old African-American girl who discovers that her grandmother is actually from the mystical city of Marai, which is magically hidden in the Sahara. Amber has inherited her grandmother's talents as a seer, and is urgently needed to guide the elders of Marai to who the next leader will be. The only problem is, she has no idea that the city is real, and the knowledge turns her whole world view upside down... She embarks on a dangerous trek across the world with her grandmother, to Paris, Senegal, Timbuktu, and finally Marai - all the while pursued by the minions of a power-hungry Marai elitist with his eye on the throne. The story i

How Black Panther Is Changing Blackness

Image
Something important happened when the Black Panther poster and subsequent trailer dropped (an unorthodox 8 months before the movie release date). The film was already greatly anticipated by comic book movie fans since the character's introduction in Captain America: Civil War, but the trailer for the 2018 solo film propelled it to new heights  I have felt from the moment Marvel's character Black Panther appeared in Civil War, that this was going to be something different, something special. Every now and then, a piece of art in the form of cinema changes movies, and even culture itself, forever.  I'm not saying Black Panther's solo movie will do that, but there are some aspects that it has already begun to affect in various degrees: 1. People call him the "First" Black Superhero Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther Now, many will dispute this and bring up Blade as the truly first black superhero. While he was iconic in his own right, the Da