No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller
Age Range: 12 - 18 years
Grade Level: 7 - 12
2012 CCBC Choices 2013 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award
2012 School Library Journal Best Books of the Year
2012 The Horn Book Fanfare
2013 Coretta Scott King Book Award
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SUMMARY
"You can't walk straight on a crooked line. You do you'll break your leg. How can you walk straight in a crooked system?"
Lewis Michaux was born to do things his own way. When a white banker told him to sell fried chicken, not books, because "Negroes don't read," Lewis took five books and one hundred dollars and built a bookstore. It soon became the intellectual center of Harlem, a refuge for everyone from Muhammad Ali to Malcolm X.
In No Crystal Stair, Coretta Scott King Award–winning author Vaunda Micheaux Nelson combines meticulous research with a storyteller's flair to document the life and times of her great-uncle Lewis Michaux, an extraordinary literacy pioneer of the Civil Rights era.
REVIEWS
"Opened at the end of the Great Depression, Michaux's National Memorial African Bookstore became a central gathering place for African American writers, artists, intellectuals, and political figures. In this extraordinary, inspiring book, short chapters are written in thirty-six different voices―mostly of Michaux himself and other historical people." —The Horn Book Guide
"Lewis Michaux provided a venue for his fellow African-Americans to have access to their own history and philosophy at a time when the very idea was revolutionary…with an inventory of five books, he started his National Memorial African Bookstore as 'the home of proper propaganda' and built it into a Harlem landmark, where he encouraged his neighbors to read, discuss and learn, whether or not they could afford to buy…copious [of] illustrations [are] in the form of photographs, copies of appropriate ephemera and Christie's powerfully emotional free-form line drawings add depth and focus. A stirring and thought-provoking account of an unsung figure in 20th-century American history."― Kirkus Reviews