Best Books 2024: Art Tatum African American Resource Center

Posted on January 24, 2025

by Eric P

When you think about it, does reading biographies even make sense? Why are you taking a break from life to read about another life? It’s like waking up to watch a movie of someone else’s nap.

But there’s a reason that biographies are popular, and it’s not because some lives are more interesting or exciting than others. Okay, some lives are more interesting and exciting — spoiler alert, mine’s nowhere near the top 5,000 — but that’s not a prerequisite for a good read. There are plenty of tedious books about exciting lives, and compelling books about uneventful ones. (Paging Marcel Proust.)

The key is in the telling. And 2024 was a great year for well-told biographies. Just check the shelves of the Toledo Library’s Art Tatum African American Resource Center, a curated collection of books and other materials about Black experiences and cultural heritage that has been housed at the Kent Branch Library since 1989. In the past twelve months the Resource Center has acquired Tiya Miles’ Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, David Greenberg’s John Lewis, Judith Tick’s Becoming Ella Fitzgerald, Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir Lovely One, and Julian Randall’s The Dead Don’t Need Reminding.

Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles

Book

John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg

Book

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald by Judith Tick

Book | Audiobook

Lovely One by Ketanji Brown Jackson

Book | eBook | Audiobook | Large Print

The Dead Don’t Need Reminding: In Search of Fugitives, Mississippi, and Black TV Nerd Shit by Julian Randall

Book | eBook | Audiobook

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