During the Age of Jim Crow, African-American giants W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Paul Robeson (1898-1976) anguished over the fate of millions of working class blacks, including convict-lease prisoners, sharecroppers and indigent laborers.

Spoken Out Loud:A bibliophile can move the stacks, but she can never overcome the pull.

Writing in 1921, newspaperman Herbert J. Seligmann reported that decades after emancipation, white Southern judges routinely sold African-Americans into peonage or quasi-slavery for such "crimes" as debt and vagrancy. Courts leased blacks convicted of petty offenses to local governments, planters and private corporations to work off their fines on chain gangs or in mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms and factories. Abused, whipped and frequently murdered, "in any full sense the Negro is not considered a human being," Seligmann charged.

'Warriors' series for young readers takes on life's big issues with feline feistiness.

Now here is a subject one doesn't see addressed in poetry all that often -- especially with such a warm, complicated embrace. To Philip Schultz, recent co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, failure is not a pejorative but a state of being.

In 'Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making,' Washington insider David Rothkopf provides an interesting new take on elites.

A collection of writings about the environment reveals passion and prescience.

This book is misnamed. "The 10,000 Most Beautiful Experiments" would have been more accurate.

Rob Christensen's "The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics" is a remarkable disclosure of the disconcerting reality that power must be seized and that there is no nice way to seize it ... even if you are a North Carolinian!

Biographies of novelist Joseph Conrad are nothing new. British scholar John Stape mentions toward the opening of his book that he is launching the fourth generation of Conrad biography.

'Souvenir" is the title of Raleigh resident Therese Fowler's capable debut novel, but I would've called it "Meg's Choice."

Sloane Crosley has to be the coolest name in writing -- a name that sounds like a writer, or perhaps a WASP clothier. And wouldn't you know that her first collection -- Crosley has written for the New York Observer, among many other places -- proves that she's charming, funny and, cumulatively, a little bit desperate.

Jhumpa Lahiri's first two books were more vivid than free. Albums of precision, they depicted a Bengali-American world rich with customs and cuisine, with vermilion striping the parted hair of married women, with second-generation children wielding Ivy League degrees and navigating contradictory worlds. "Unaccustomed Earth" returns to this same upwardly mobile immigrant setting, but it achieves something more profound than either "The Interpreter of Maladies," Lahiri's debut short story collection, or "The Namesake," her novel. The eight longish stories here (three of them interconnected) drop their pose and by rearranging themselves -- shifting against themselves -- achieve something forceful and wise. It may be the hybrid length that gives them their naturalness. Lahiri seems to have waited on the unfolding, refusing either to expand the pieces into novellas or to fastidiously tighten the scope. The first story alone is more than 50 pages long.

Ida M. Tarbell defined investigative journalism when she took on John D. Rockefeller.

Eric Lichtblau is used to being cast as a hero or a villain for his reporting about the war on terror. This year, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, predicted that "some Americans are going to die" because of the public debate that resulted when Lichtblau and his New York Times colleague James Risen disclosed the existence of the Bush administration's secret surveillance program; for the same articles, Lichtblau and Risen won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

Sunday Reader:"And finally," Jamie said as he pushed the door open, we come to the main event. Your room."

I was about 100 pages into Alex Berenson's mesmerizing new spy thriller, "The Ghost War," one midnight dreary recently when the familiar National Weather Service "BWAAA! BWAAA! BWAAA!" started exploding incessantly from a nearby radio, warning of imminent severe thunderstorms, possible tornadoes and the dreaded "straight-line winds."

As Bill Mauldin lay dying in Newport Beach, Calif., old men who remembered how much his cartoons had meant to them made pilgrimages to the nursing home.

At the end of World War II, there were no more than 16 Akita dogs left in Japan. What had been, before the war, the national breed, had been slaughtered wholesale for use as food and fur for the coats of Japanese military officers.

Children's Books:In January, when two committees appointed by the American Library Association announced the best children's picture book (Caldecott) and longer work (Newbery), political candidates were cruising the country shaking hands and making pledges. This year's committees and the two books they honored -- Brian Selznick's "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" (Scholastic $22.99, ages 8-12) and Laura Amy Schlitz's "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!" (Candlewick, $19.99, ages 8-12) -- have important messages for our politicians.

Gardeners who follow seven principles cultivate land and souls.

Hear Me Roar:During this "historic" election year, let me just say what so many of us are thinking: I miss Bella Abzug. And Barbara Jordan. What I would give to see Bella toss one of her signature striped, oversized hats into the presidential ring. Or to hear Barbara Jordan debate any comer, to hear her intone the preamble of the constitution as she reminds us of the true meanings of "equality" and "justice." If only big, bold Bella or big, bold Barbara were here to run ... and win.