Nathan Mccall

Detectives have arrested three men in connection with the execution-style slaying of a former KPFK radio host. Michael Taylor, who many activists say led Los Angeles coverage of imprisoned black journalist Mumia Abu Jamal's case in Philadelphia, was found shot to death near Crenshaw Boulevard and 67th Avenue on April 23. One of the suspects was captured while driving Taylor's 1973 yellow VW Beetle.

As turkey is to Thanksgiving and roast beef to Christmas, so lamb is to Easter and Passover. It's the best season of the year for an industry that's been struggling to get more racks and legs on American dinner plates. Lamb and mutton consumption in the U.S. has dropped for the last four years and is expected to be flat at best in 2012, according to the American Lamb Board. Experts blame a sluggish economy and lamb's high price relative to other meats. Racks of lamb were selling this week at a Whole Foods market in Los Angeles for a hefty $17.99 a pound.

Several years ago, I joined a small group of authors in studying what we believed to be a crisis endangering serious works of fiction and nonfiction. We had presumed that major publishing houses, virtually all of them owned by corporations fixated on the bottom line, were cutting risks by signing up fewer such titles if they did not appear to have bestseller potential. But this conventional wisdom proved wrong. Publishers bought and produced more so-called mid-list books each year.

The clubby world of American publishing was rocked Thursday when Random House Inc. abruptly ousted Ann Godoff, the highly regarded president, publisher and editor in chief of its Random House Trade Group, often referred to as "the imprint that William Faulkner built."

A sharp eye and a generous heart distinguish this memoir by Chicago civil rights attorney Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii in 1961 to a black African father and a white American mother and who became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. Its generosity is what strikes us most.

Lawrence Otis Graham was 24 when he got his nose done. He had wanted to do it years before; nose jobs were "the spring break activity of choice," he says, at his affluent New York suburban high school. But his parents considered a nose job an act of racial self-hatred. So he waited and he agonized. Standing before mirrors, he would pinch his nose to make it thinner or take his fingers and flatten his lips against his teeth.

African American men have the worst public relations problem in the world. A skewed image serves as our international emissary, misrepresenting us in the Global Village, presenting our painful sores but neglecting to introduce our full, rich humanity. Our image stinks. It rots in Japan, spoils in Germany, and often festers in our own minds. Painful sores can be messy, but they fit neatly onto the television screen (especially at 11 p.m.). Numerous news reports showing brothers acting ill eclipse the infrequent non-crime stories.

Sam Fulwood III's memoir, "Waking from the Dream," is part of a recent boom in African American autobiographical narratives, many by journalists. Those that come to mind are titles by Jill Nelson, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Nathan McCall and Brent Staples. They relate the experiences of the '60s and post-civil rights generation, people whose lives were literally shaped by the movement and its gains in integration and affirmative action.

In the spring of 1992, Deborah Chasman, then a 28-year-old editor at Beacon Press in Boston, flew to Princeton University to meet with Cornel West. A professor of religion and political science, West had established himself as perhaps the country's preeminent left-wing thinker, and Chasman hoped to persuade him to put together a collection of essays.