Fromhistory to memory

IT might be hard to make up your mind, as there is a wide selection to choose from for this year’s Newsday T&T People’s Choice Book of The Year in the NGC Bocas Lit Fest.

Eventually six will be chosen from the 39 and then the final one, which will become this year’s people’s choice. So here’s some information on some of the nominated titles for which voting continues until April 25.

In round two readers will choose a winner from the final six for which voting will run from May 1-June 1.

One of the nominees is Nichola Harvey’s 21 Powerful P’s to Success. The 2017 book chronicles Harvey’s success and the “21 principles that start with the letter ‘P’ that contributed to her personal success.”

The author is a social entrepreneur, management consultant, motivational speaker and part-time lecturer and has over 23 years of corporate experience. Harvey has an MBA (international), mini MBA in telecoms, and a BSc in Sociology and management as well as several certificates. She is a Toastmasters Competent Communicator and certified entrepreneurship teacher.

Harvey’s greatest achievement, her bio states, is founding the NGO We Say Yes Organisation, which focuses on youth entrepreneurship and self-empowerment.

The “workbook and toolkit” are written in “a very candid, genuine and conversational tone.”

Falling under the category of literary non-fiction, Tevin Dube’s Amen: A Great Light Within Divine Darkness, “addresses many controversial issues such as racism; giving a totally new outlook of why racial inequalities do exists (sic) in that the entire world will never view the dark-skinned races the same ever again. Not even pigmented beings would ever be able to view themselves the same ever again. It represents liberation at its summit,” the blurb reads.

It further describes the self-published work as “philosophical but revolutionary and deeply insightful.”

After losing his father at nine, Dube went on to become the top Cape student and valedictorian at his high school in 2010. He has published two books in less than a year and is set to publish a third this year.

Hugh Blanc’s Bryden: In Colour of Memory tells the story of one of TT’s “foremost watercolourists” and costume designer Harry Bryden and recalls his early life “from his early years as a quiet child in a pastoral St Ann’s to a young man pressured by familial expectations, through his accomplishments in business, art and the stage.”

The 2017 book, published by Phoenix Publishing Ltd, is described as “a nostalgic recounting of a bountiful life, as well as a window into the psyche of a Caribbean artist.”

This is not Blanc’s first work. He also published the 2012 Between Bodies Lie, which told the story of Cristobal Porter. Blanc has also extending his storytelling to other media, having recently written and directed his first short film as well as working as a writer and editor on the documentary To Be a Renegade.

Academic Jerome Teelucksingh’s Civil Rights in America and the Caribbean, 1950s and 2010s, “illustrates the parallel struggles among blacks in the US and the Caribbean for equality and greater political participation and equal treatment during the 1960s and 1970s.”

Published by Palgrave, the 2017 book recalls the historical evolution of the Civil Rights and Black Power movement, and book focuses on lesser-known individuals and groups such as the students for racial equality.

The book’s blurb says it “argues that these personalities and smaller organisations made valid contributions to the betterment (of) their respective societies, connecting their work to both the cultural and social justice history of Civil Rights and to the contemporary struggles of cultural and political experience of blacks in American and Caribbean society.”

You, too, can take a look at the nominations and also vote for your favourite books by visiting https://www.bocaslitfest.com/peopleschoice/. You still have some time to vote for your favourite books, as first-round voting ends on April 25.