Word: oprahization
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These days, it seems, a book's not a book if it ain't got a seal on it. There's the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize, Oprah's Book Club, and, on Nov. 19, the 58th annual National Book Awards (NBA) ceremony - in which the National Book Foundation will present four $10,000 prizes to an author in each category: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people's literature. Judges - who are writers nominated by past NBA winners, finalists and judges and then selected by the foundation's board - hold deliberations independently of board and staff members. Winners are only...
...page Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), for example, was a critical darling and Pulitzer finalist, that, like those first NBA winners, failed to top bestseller lists. And in 2001, Jonathan Franzen, winner of the fiction award for his 500-page work The Corrections, bristled at being chosen for Oprah's Book Club a month prior, inciting calls of elitism from other writers. But the foundation has recognized some household names in its past: Oprah Winfrey herself received a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1999, as did horror master Stephen King...
...white man. The truth is that the dominant conversation in the black community today is not about racism or victimization but about self-improvement. In a 2007 Pew survey of black America, Bill Cosby was rated second among public figures believed to have the best influence on African Americans; Oprah, not exactly a doyenne of black complaint, ranked first. That same year, a study of young people by the University of Chicago found that while black kids consumed more rap videos than their white counterparts, about 60% of them thought the portrayals of black women were offensive...
...Wednesday, the Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. appeared on Oprah Winfrey's celebratory post-election special. After learning the news, Gates says, "we jumped up, we wept, we hooped and hollered." It is hard to overestimate the historical significance of the election of the first black U.S. President. For many blacks, and certainly for much of the country and world, Obama's victory is an extraordinary step toward the redemption of America's original 400-year-old sin. It is astonishing not least for its quickness, coming just 145 years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation...
...think she was qualified to be Vice President - a view shared by many mandarins of the GOP. But the enthusiasm she briefly generated made gaming Palin's next move a popular sport. Will she join the big-money speaker's circuit? Become, as Tina Fey joked, the "white Oprah"? Run for Senate? Run for President in 2012 as the new face of a reinvented Republican Party...