Known in the early 20th century as the site of a black cultural renaissance and later as a symbol of urban decline, Harlem has long been considered a center of African-American life. This unique community is showcased in an attractive new photo-essay book, Spirit of Harlem: A Portrait of America’s Most Exciting Neighborhood. The collection was created by writer Craig Marberry and photographer Michael Cunningham, the duo who previously collaborated on Crowns, a surprise hit book about the church hats worn by black women.

In their latest effort, Marberry and Cunningham steer clear of celebrities and focus their attention on the everyday people who live and work in Harlem. This storied neighborhood on the northern end of Manhattan, which the poet Langston Hughes described as an “island within an island,” is home to people of diverse ethnicities and occupations. Spirit of Harlem profiles many of these residents with black-and-white photos and brief essays based on Marberry’s interviews with the subjects. We meet a literary agent, a preacher, a nun and a saxophonist, among others, who share their vision of the neighborhood they call home. “I love Harlem,” says hat shop owner Junior “Bunn” Leonard, a native of Trinidad who makes one-of-a-kind hats for his customers. “If I took my hat shop downtown, I could get two, three times, what I get in Harlem. But it’s not about that.” As Gordon Parks notes in a foreword, these voices taken together produce a varied portrait of this changing and revitalized community, reflecting “the vivid soul of Harlem, light refracted into a rainbow of colors.”

When they think of Harriet Tubman, most adults probably imagine a woman holding a rifle and leading slaves to freedom by following the North Star. Tubman’s heroics, summarized and simplified for children’s books and young adult texts, have long been a staple of book reports and Black History Month observances in schools. While those stories convey the courageousness of her life as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Catherine Clinton’s new biography, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, reveals they have only scratched the surface of the fugitive slave’s remarkable courage and mystique.

Touted as the first serious biography of Tubman, Clinton’s book reads more like an adventure tale than a history lesson. The author depicts Tubman’s extraordinary role with the Underground Railroad, where she was the only fugitive slave and the only woman who dared attempt “abductions,” the term for entering the South to lead slaves North. Tubman’s faith, planning and intuition yielded a perfect record of successful liberations. Some attributed her success to divine intervention, further contributing to the Tubman mystique.

Though many readers know Tubman conducted fugitives to freedom, few know about her largest liberation effort, in which she freed hundreds of slaves while assisting the Union army during the Civil War. Harriet Tubman details Tubman’s Civil War service as well as more personal aspects of her life, including the heartbreak of her first marriage and the mystery surrounding Tubman’s “kidnapping” of an eight-year-old girl. Clinton also offers overviews of slavery, the abolition movement and the Civil War to help readers put Tubman’s experience in context.

Throughout her life, Tubman worked to help others, through dangerous missions as well as by working for the comfort of ex-slaves in a society that still locked them out of most services and opportunities. Clinton’s biography provides an in-depth look at Tubman and holds moments of wonder for readers. Bernadette Adams Davis is a playwright and reviewer in Florida.

No volume recounting the history of lynching could ever be fun to read. But Philip Dray’s book At the Hands of Persons Unknown is timely, impressively researched and written well the next best thing to enjoyable.

Although Dray goes back many centuries into history to demonstrate the inhumanity of the dominant culture against minority cultures, his book focuses on the years 1882 to 1962, coinciding with detailed archives at Tuskegee University, a predominately African-American college in Alabama. Researchers at Tuskegee relied mostly on newspapers and magazines to learn about lynchings, publishing a yearly tabulation that, Dray says, "came to be considered a definitive tally a kind of Dow Jones ticker of the nation’s most vicious form of intolerance." Dray, who teaches African-American history at New York City’s New School, learned about the Tuskegee archives in 1986. Before mining the archives’ awful riches, he says, "Like most people, I was aware that lynching had been an aberrational form of racial violence in the Deep South, and a means by which cattle rustlers and card cheats had sometimes received rough frontier justice." After seeing the extent of the archives’ holdings, Dray understood that lynchings were far less sporadic than he had realized. "A holocaust!" Dray heard himself saying.

That all-American holocaust is filled with flesh-and-blood human beings who transcend the horrifying statistics. The book is populated with victims, lawless lynchers and heroic outsiders like journalist Ida B. Wells and W.E.

B. Du Bois, both of whom valiantly crusaded to halt the practice. Given the near-extinction of lynchings by the mid-1960s, Dray’s by-definition depressing book ends with a hint of optimism. But as lynchings have waned, they still seem timely. Why? Partly because lynching is usually a manifestation of racism, and racism remains in 2002, and partly because every year hundreds of innocent individuals are convicted of crimes in U.S. courtrooms. Some of those wrongly convicted individuals end up on death row. That phenomenon cannot accurately be called lynching, but it is certainly lynching’s first cousin.

Steve Weinberg is a book author and magazine writer in Columbia, Missouri.