Arnold Adoff (1935–2021)

Through poems and poetic prose pieces, acclaimed children's author Arnold Adoff celebrates that uniquely American form of music called the blues. In his signature “shaped speech” style, he creates a narrative of moments and joyous music, from the drums of the ancestors, the red dirt of the plantations, the current of the mighty Mississippi, and the shackles, blood, and tears of slavery. Each chop of the ax is a beat, each lash of the whip fashions another line on the musical staff. But show more each sound also creates the chords and harmonies that preserve the ancestors and their stories, and sustain life, faith, and hope into our own times. show less

I was not a fan of Black is Brown is Tan, at all. This book was difficult to follow and seemed to follow a strange structure, like some version of poetry. The author choose a strange format to arrange the words on the page, some words has staggered spacing and some lines were indented and double spaced but the words were not placed in an organized manner on the page. Having the words positioned in a strange manner caused me as a reader to lose focus on the reading because I was forced to show more mentally arrange the words to figure out what comes next. I believe with a few improvements this book would have been very successful. I believe the big idea of the book was to show the perspective of a child being product of a biracial couple. The concept is great, however with the strange structure, somewhat poetic writing style and the lack of flow I believe that the reader is losing out on the content intended to be shown in this book. show less

This small 1968 paperback is an anthology of poems on the subject of the "black experience" in the USA. As a college student, I was not a fan of poetry, but I was an advocate of racial justice and equality, a reason why this work caught my attention. I read it with much enjoyment, and my copy contains dog-eared pages marking poems that I found especially profound or meaningful. Among the poems represented are works by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Leroi Jones, and many other poets. I am show more pleased to see that the work was republished in expanded form in the late 1990s; it deserves to be appreciated by new generations of readers. show less

Black is Brown is Tan is a book is about a day in the life of a family. This family has a mother and father and two children. What makes this book different is because it addresses that the skin color of the mother, father and children are all different. It is written in the form of poetry to tell the story.

First let me say that it was refreshing to read a story about a multiracial family without being "colorblind" and say that everyone is the same. I liked that unlike most books that I show more have read that the father is white and and the mother is black, it reflects my own parentage but is rarely have seen it in literature. I also like that the mother is darker skinned black woman with correct ethnic features rather than what is often done which is just to draw a racial ambiguous woman with light brown skin. The fact that this was written in 1973 blows my mind away because of its awareness. The author wrote this book about his own family. show less