Friday 3/5 – Thursday 3/11
The first African-American professional baseball team, formed in 1885, was called the Cuban Giants. Back then there was a flourishing intellectual, cultural, and social relationship between black Americans and black Cubans, fed by their similar experiences of oppression, according to Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution, a collection of essays coedited by Lisa Brock, a history professor at the School of the Art Institute. Unfortunately, that relationship all but died after the Cuban missile crisis and the rise of Fidel Castro. When she asked Jet magazine for permission to reprint a 1959 cover of a Cuban woman, Brock was told she couldn’t because of the image’s “political nature.” Brock will discuss the book tonight at a free reading that starts at 7 at 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th (773-684-1300).
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10 WEDNESDAY In 1993, bored by her “mundane lifestyle on the Gold Coast” and disturbed by TV footage of violence in the former Yugoslavia, local publicist and ghostwriter Ellen Blackman decided to go to Bosnia. She planned to spend just ten days helping out wherever she could. But she ended up staying several months, working from a bombed-out office in Sarajevo. She also convinced the late Jay Pritzker to help her bring 60 Bos-nian adults and children to the U.S. for medical treatment; many of them resettled in Chicago. She’ll read from her book about the experience, Harvest in the Snow: My Crusade to Rescue the Lost Children of Bosnia, tonight at 7 at Barnes & Noble, 1130 N. State (312-280-1143). A portion of the book’s profits will go to Jana’s House, a charity for Bosnian children.
