The 13 Best Books to Pick Up This November

In 1957, self-taught historian Joel Augustus Rogers’s 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof was billed as the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! of black history, a compendium of information intended to debunk what Rogers saw as racist propaganda and remind readers in the harrowing Jim Crow era how rich the contributions of black people had been from way, way back.

Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. first encountered this slim volume as a Yale undergraduate, and it made an impression. Now he’s written an homage to Rogers’s work, also called 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro. Updated with new material, it sheds light on the obscure and fleshes out the familiar in an accessible Q&A format that makes dipping in and out easy.