Word: lester
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...literature, men in their 50s who were read Sambo when they were young but who'd kept it out of the hands of their offspring. "As a child, I liked the little boy and the story but I felt very bad about how he was depicted," says Julius Lester, an African-American writer who, along with illustrator Jerry Pinkney, also black, has reconfigured the book as Sam and The Tigers (Dial). "The original is a little masterpiece," argues illustrator Fred Marcellino, who's white. "Its good qualities really outweigh its racist elements." Marcellino has called his reworking The Story...
...books take somewhat opposite approaches to the story of a boy who tricks tigers into sparing his life in return for his new clothes, and then steals them back when the tigers' vanity gets the better of them. Lester and Pinkney, who also reinterpreted the Uncle Remus books, have filled out the original narrative, setting the story in a fantasyland where every human is called Sam and animals talk (the tigers sound like up-to-the-minute hep cats, saying "Ain't I fine?" instead of "Now I'm the grandest tiger in the jungle!"). Lester and Pinkney also give...
...first reluctant to resuscitate it. "There will be some people who think this is capitalizing on something evil," says Steven Herb, head of the Education Library at Pennsylvania State University. But the authors say people's initial horror is soon overcome. "At first people's mouths drop open," says Lester. "They say, 'Have you lost your mind?' But after they read the new version, they love it." Perhaps even Sambo deserves a second chance...
...mostly avoids pastiche. The musicians don't try to impersonate their great historical counterparts, like Count Basie, Lester Young, Oran ("Hot Lips") Page and Mary Lou Williams, though in the film some correspondences are suggested. The spirit of the Kansas City scene is what they evoke, while remaining idiosyncratically and often exuberantly themselves...
...arguments that [Russell is] some kind of bigot," says community activist Lester P. Lee, who is black. "She agrees on many issues important to our community...