2026

Take Me to Your Leader, Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter by Neil deGrasse Tyson is a witty, playful, mind-bending, and challenging combination of science, physics, history, sociology, psychology, and all the other ‘ologies combined. This world-renowned astrophysicist challenges everything from creation, UFOs, and religion to basic common sense deftly and with humor. It starts

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates grabs you right from the beginning and refuses to let you go. The very first chapter, “Journalism Is Not a Luxury,” resonated with me immediately and with the mission of The DC Voice. The book starts with Coates recounting the summer of 2022, when he returns to Howard University to

I bought this book about three years ago. It rolled around from one part of the basement to another, finding itself in boxes to be donated, but it never quite made it out of the house. It wasn’t until I read Eddie Glaude Jr.’s Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul that

Like most books on the transatlantic slave trade, this book highlights the fact that slavery was common in Africa and other parts of the world. Prisoners captured in battle were commonly enslaved by their captors. It covers the Arab slave trade, which preceded the transatlantic slave trade by hundreds of years. It also delves into

The Washington Mall, in Southwest DC, home of most of DC’s notable landmarks and tourist destinations, is an area my parents spoke of with reverence. Whenever they ran into someone who lived in Southwest it was like a reunion. They would go on and on about people, events and remembrances for what seemed like hours.

Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital by Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove is a detailed, decade-by-decade walk through of the history of changes in the area that would become the home of the nation’s capital: Washington, D.C. It tracks the evolution of the D.C. area from the

This short read is one of the many accounts of the transatlantic slave trade and the culpability of African nations. It deals with both the transatlantic slave trade to the “Americas” and the East African/Indian Ocean slave trade fueled by “European greed.” It fueled the plantation economies of the new world and created a “human”