This volume was a bit intimidating at first. However, I found that each fact was afforded a few pages, which made it easy to pick up and put down frequently. I found some questions might have been posed a century ago, and some were very modern — all of them were intriguing.

I liked the contents of this book, but I struggled with the organization. It's really hard to get into the flow of the book when things jump around from "Here's a story about a cool pirate" to "Here's a story about some professor in the sixties." I understand that that's the whole framing device based on the previous "100 Facts", but it didn't work for me at all.

I learned a lot of new facts from this book, but its style wasn't all that great. Gates is apparently good at writing lists of facts, but he's not entirely enjoyable to read.

Well, if you're looking for one book to read during Black History Month, you could to a lot worse than this fascinating collection of articles about black history by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The book took us from Pushkin to Dumas, Argentina to Ethiopia, from Jack Johnson (the first black heavyweight champion) to Saint Maurice (the first black saint.)

It told us about Malcolm X at Oxford, John Brown at Harper's Ferry, and the only black family on the Titanic.

Gates does a fantastic job providing context and research and always fascinating stories.

It's my first 5 star book this year. Y'all should read it.

This was a great book! This collection of short essays about black history was endlessly fascinating. High-school teacher colleagues, this might work really well in social studies or English classes, either as a whole or excerpted.