Harlem World: How Hip Hop’s Super Showdown Changed Music Forever by Jonathan Mael
Reviewed by Robert Surratt
Manager of Access Services, Central Library
San Diego Union Tribune, February 9, 2025

Before Kendrick Lamar versus Drake, before Jay-Z versus Nas, there was the Fantastic Romantic Five versus the Cold Crush Brothers at the Harlem World nightclub in 1981. In Harlem World: How Hip Hop’s Super Showdown Changed Music Forever, author Jonathan Mael explores the early phenomenon of rap and hip hop—from its community room beginnings and summertime park jams to its emergence in the late-night club scene as the disco era waned. The organic rise of hip hop’s underground culture created an echelon of “ghetto celebrities,” such as inventive DJs who looped record breaks for acrobatic dancers and showcased masters of ceremonies who enchanted listeners with braggadocio rhyme routines aimed at keeping the party live. While the book centers the now-infamous onstage battle between the rival crews, it foreshadows the event by recounting a pivotal moment in hip hop’s history: the 1979 release of Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” which ultimately changed how people encountered and engaged with the music.

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson
Reviewed by Steven Torres-Roman
Librarian, Central Library
San Diego Union Tribune, January 26, 2025

Earth’s future has some interesting challenges: rising sea levels, an unsteady economy, absurd levels of social media saturation and surveillance, and contact with an alien species, the Logi. Lydia works as a translator for the Logi cultural attaché, Fitz. Translating for the Logi is rather demanding – very few humans have the ability to perceive the aliens’ thoughts, and the training is rigorous. Fortunately, Lydia is very good at her job, though telepathic translating can be tricky, as the aliens’ projected thoughts can induce a state of inebriation in a human mind. When an exhausting evening of interpreting leaves Lydia’s memory a blank, she finds herself at the center of an intergalactic incident! As various factions maneuver to take advantage of the situation and manipulate events for their own purposes, Lydia’s only hope is to do some amateur sleuthing. Robson successfully takes the pulse of present social media trends in depicting a convincing (and absurdly humorous) near-future, and the character of Lydia is a delightful, relatable working-class woman who, though out of her depth, perseveres and discovers surprisingly impressive reserves of courage and ingenuity.

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss by Margalit Fox
Reviewed by Angie Stava
Catalog Librarian, Central Library
San Diego Union Tribune, January 12, 2025

Imagine landing in New York in 1850 with no money, knowing that no matter how hard you peddled, you would be doomed to poverty in the tenements. Would you accept it? Or, like Fredericka Mandelbaum, would you make your own luck? Within just twenty years, German Jewish immigrant Mandelbaum rose from a street peddler to become the leader of the largest organized-crime network in New York. With a single store as a front, she moved millions of dollars’ worth of luxury goods - silks, jewelry, anything that could be stolen by the thieves she mentored. Later specializing in diamonds, then bank robberies, she was untouchable for decades - because Fredericka cultivated not just thieves, but politicians, police, and businessmen who could all be bought. This is an unforgettable story of how one woman’s personality intersected with Gilded Age New York to create a dramatic, remarkable, and criminal life.