n the films Zelig and Forrest Gump, the main characters are placed—through the wonders of technology—into the midst of some of modern history’s greatest events and figures.

In Ted Poston: Pioneer American Journalist, author Kathleen Hauke employs the same strategy, with one huge difference: Poston actually covered these events and wrote about these people!

So not only do we get an enormously provocative biography of the dean of black journalists, but a thoroughly engaging history lesson as well.

In 1936, Poston became the first black hired by the New York Post. He went on to cover the Scottsboro Boys’ trial—which earned him a nomination for the Columbia University-sponsored Pulitzer Prize in 1949—the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the Medgar Evers murder trial, the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, and the rise of Martin Luther King.

He profiled Thurgood Marshall, Mahalia Jackson, Althea Gibson and Lorraine Hansberry, went to Russia in 1932 with Langston Hughes, helped Heywood Broun create the American Newspaper Guild in 1935, checked out Klan activities with Marshall, befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, and became a member of FDR’s esteemed “Black Cabinet” during WWII.

To his credit, Poston remained very close with the black press. Even after the mainstream press had begun to integrate, Poston “felt the black press was still essential, for still too few of his white counterparts were ‘qualified, by

recent experience, to speak of the sufferings and aspirations of the Negro people.’ ”

Of course, Poston felt the arrows of racism. Early in his Post tenure, he was sent to cover police headquarters where nobody spoke to him for two weeks. Of bad conditions he suffered on a cruise, he said, “The trouble is that often I forget that I’m black and when something like this happens, I’m too painfully reminded.”

Writes Robert L. Joiner in The Washington Post Book World: “[Poston] humanized the black experience for a largely white readershipÉ [his] journalistic achievements were staggering, and he deserves recognition for having blazed a trail for others.”

One of those was Nancy Hicks Maynard, hired by the Post in 1967. “I arrived on my first day of [regular] reporting and suddenly, here he was, this wonderful man. He was lanky, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and as bright a human being as you would ever want to meet, so skilled at what he did, but so protective. What Ted meant to my success was something I didn’t know for ten years afterwards.”

Hauke reminds all of us just how special this man was.

Ted Poston: Pioneer American Journalist. By Kathleen Hauke. 194 pages. University of Georgia Press. Athens. Hardcover. $29.95.

he Gift would be an amazing story even without the actual “gift.” For by the time Dwayne Bray tells us the events that led to his giving a kidney to cousin Calvin, we are three-quarters of the way through the book and have not put it down.

What Bray, sports editor of the Dayton Daily News, shows us is that mere events do not lead one to bestow this gift. Love, family and devotion do that, even if that love comes from a 31-year-old grandmother with seven children in a small house in an impoverished Cleveland neighborhood.

We see young Bray surrounded by women having babies and men having disappeared. Moved from place to place, he survives because of an extended family and an affinity for sports. His ascendancy to reporter begins when a corrupt local judge is exposed in the newspaper.

“I begin following every detail of the case in The Plain Dealer. I am fascinated by the work of reporter George JordanÉ . His work seems fun, challengingÉ . For the first time I know that I want to go to college and become a newspaper reporter.”

At Cleveland State University, he joins the African American student paper and moves over to become sports editor of

the mainstream Vindicator. The Plain Dealer employs him as a customer service rep, but rejects him for an editorial internship. It takes a small paper, the Medina Gazette, for Bray to get his start. It’s then onto the Dayton Daily News, a Kiplinger Fellowship at Ohio State, the Los Angeles Times and back to Dayton.

By this time, Calvin, whom Bray was close to growing up, has been on dialysis for a few years and even gone through a kidney transplant from his father. That kidney has now failed. Over objections from his wife, Bray makes his decision.

“Nothing else has worked for Calvin. I am thirty-two, relatively young and healthy. God has given me two kidneys that function just fine. I have to give him one of mine.” A happy ending follows excruciating moments in the hospital, and we want to applaud with the rest of the Dayton Daily News staff when Bray returns to work.

The Gift: Learning to Appreciate the Value of Life. By Dwayne Bray. 231 pages. Longstreet Press, Marietta, Ga. Hardcover. $22.