Click on book Image to purchase.
UNSTINTING PRAISE FOR WENDY JONES’S NEW BOOK
A native of the South, a descendant of slaves, and the daughter of sharecroppers, Mrs. Jones ventured North, to New York and Harlem, to find her chance. The tale of her tenacious advance, transforming what to others might seem to be insurmountable obstacles and burdens, into opportunities to shine—the stuff of alchemy, might in less able hands, seem apocryphal. But Wendy Jones, like her role-model-mother, keeps things real.
The saga she spins out is so inspirational, because in relating the highly specific history of a highly individual figure, she has made her mother’s quest: to enhance her community, to enlighten her people, to educate and arm–with truth and an appreciation of beauty–her only child, into a universal story. If her mother was an alchemist, turning dross into life’s gold, with this memoir written with her mom, Wendy Jones, can be considered like Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein – she makes mere dead words on a page live, to recreate in the form of a woman of African descent, born poor but curious, an all-American hero.
Michael Henry Adams – author of Harlem, Lost and Found: An Architectural and Social History, 1765-1915 and currently working on the forthcoming Homo Harlem: A Chronicle of Lesbian and Gay Life in the African American Cultural Capital, 1915-1995.
An Extraordinary Life: Josephine E. Jones is an empowering book that lifts the level of every reader’s thought pattern. Most admirable, is her love for young people and her drive to help them find ways to lift themselves above the stereotypes embedded in a system that always seems bent on keeping them down. She stands up to authority and fights for principle and fairness at a time in America’s history when doing so was not without great risk. This book forces us to accept the fact that we have no excuse for inaction.
Gretna Wilkinson – Geraldine R. Dodge Poet, and founder of theravensperch.com, an international literary magazine.
An Extraordinary Life: Josephine E. Jones is a unique love story, that of a daughter for her mother. Wendy Jones celebrates Josephine E. Jones, the shaping of one woman’s life. The saga has a changing America, and specifically the Civil Rights Movement, as the background for An Extraordinary Life. While this is the story of one woman who migrated from the South to New York, it resonates because the path traveled by Ms. Jones is the story of black America in the twentieth century.
David Rothenberg – founder of the Fortune Society, a leading criminal justice advocacy and service organization, and author of Fortune in My Eyes.