The Best of Emerge Magazine

This whopper of an anthology perfectly captures black life and culture as offered through Emerge. Launched in 1989, the award-winning magazine provided an animated, informative alternative to mass media until its demise in June 2000. This retrospective volume is journalism at its best: probing, controversial and serious. In loose juxtaposition, American Society of Magazine Editors president Curry presents (with more than 100 columns) a mosaic of issues that resonate in the black community. A popular magazine written in a popular style, Emerge was radical in its treatment of the black condition as the human condition. Naturally, famous writers appear, including Dick Gregory, Walter Mosley, Clarence Thomas and Maxine Waters. So, too, do newsworthy major events, lest readers forget the loss of Emmet Till (lynching) or Ron Brown (airplane crash). Besides terrific writing and coverage of important news, though, Emerge had unusual breadth. It dipped into biblical scholarship, environmental issues, for-profit prisons, the Internet, the brokering of businesses and medical research. It taunted double standards: the targeting of black congressmen, genocide in Rwanda. Its coverage stretched around the world, to Kosovo, Brazil, Cuba and Japan. It kept an eye close to home, too, taking in radio talk-show hosts, Miss Apollo and churchwomen. Emerge knew how to laugh at strategies for getting away from long awards dinners. Although Emerge was devoted unequivocally to African-Americans, Curry's vision and editorship of this book will instruct, provoke and sometimes entertain or inspire any reader.