BTW Articles

Claude Brown, the author of the classic 1965 semi-autobiographical novel Manchild in the Promised Land (Simon & Schuster), died on February 2. The cause of death was a lung condition.

Brown was born in New York City in 1937 and grew up in Harlem. He graduated from Howard University in 1965 and attended law school first at Stanford, then Rutgers. He also wrote a book called The Children of Ham in 1976. He spent much of the following two decades writing magazine articles, lecturing, and teaching.

On February 6, 2002, the fight over free speech on the Internet returned to a Brattleboro, Vermont, courtroom, as the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) continued the legal case over the constitutionality of a Vermont statute criminalizing sexual content communicated via the Internet. But the hearing -- held almost a year to the day after ABFFE and a diverse group of civil rights organizations and businesses first filed the complaint -- was more a battle over legal language than free speech.

Based on the nominations of ABA member booksellers, the Book Sense Book of the Year Award finalists in five categories were announced on February 13 by the American Booksellers Association. Booksellers will vote for one winner in each category -- Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, Children's Literature, Children's Illustrated, and, new this year, Rediscovery. Nominations were drawn from the Top Ten Book Sense 76 picks of 2001.

On Thursday, February 7, about 30 booksellers attended an ABA Booksellers Forum at Weber’s Inn in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Representing ABA at the forum were Avin Mark Domnitz, ABA CEO; Len Vlahos, director of BookSense.com; and Karl Pohrt, ABA Board member, from Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor. Among the key topics discussed at the forum were ABA’s new strategic plan and BookSense.com’s new marketing initiative.