We may have been given complimentary copies of any books or other products mentioned below and/or complimentary access to any movies or shows mentioned. Any and all opinions expressed here are our own.
Books: The Book of Awesome Black Americans
Today we are recommending The Book of Awesome Black Americans by Monique L. Jackson. In this book, you will not only read about people like Rhianna, Muhammad Ali, and Harriet Tubman that you are probably very familiar with, but you will learn about many unsung heroes as well. Mary Ellen Pleasant, an abolitionist who helped fund John Brown's failed uprising and sued San Francisco for Black people's right to ride streetcars; Bryan Stevenson who among other things created a museum to remember and honor all those whose lives were ended by racist violence; and Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first Black women to earn a medical degree from an American University are only a small sampling of the people whose contributions to both Black history and history in general, will be illuminated in this book. This book may also shine a light in a new way upon many of the people you are probably already familiar with. For instance, the information about Rhianna focuses mostly on her makeup brand and not her musical career, and the information on Muhammed Ali focuses mostly on his activism.
This book crams a lot of information about a large number of people into less than three hundred pages. Accordingly, it doesn't really thoroughly cover any of the people mentioned in the book. Therefore, if you really want to delve into a particular person's life and career, you are definitely going to want to read something that is much more focused on that person. However, if you are looking to get a good overview of numerous important Black Americans particularly ones you may never have heard of, this book does a great job of that.
Today we are recommending Erasing Family, a documentary about spouses spitefully completely cutting their children off from the other parent in a divorce and/or at least poisoning the children's minds against the other parent to turn them against that parent. This documentary is extremely illuminating particularly regarding the way in which the family court system is structured in a way that is more about making money than about actually helping the children it is supposed to be helping and protecting. I also did not know that divorced spouses cutting their children off from the other spouse with little or no reason except spite was so prevalent in our society. This just shows that these parents care as little about their children and their children's needs as the courts do and it is all about themselves. There should be no reason to cut off a child from either of their parents unless actual abuse is taking place.
This movie should be required viewing for every couple going through a divorce. If they can see this movie and still feel the need to punish their former spouse by denigrating them in the eyes of their children and/or by completely cutting them out of their children's lives for little or no reason, they are not as good of a parent as they may think they are, and they are certainly not putting their children's needs first.
Erasing Family is available for viewing now on Tubi, Amazon, Vimeo, iTunes, and YouTube. It will be available on Amazon Prime starting this Sunday, February 14, 2021.
And that's our view.
Tune in tomorrow for Where-To-Go Wednesday.