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<i><p>Title: The Conversation<p>Author: Hill Harper<p>Release Date: September 8th, 2009<p>Publisher: Gotham<p>ISBN: 978-1-592-40475-9<p>Price: $20.00</i><p><i>CSI: New York</i> star <font color=yellow>Hill Harper</font>'s day job might be playing Dr. Sheldon Hawkes on the second <i>CSI: Crime Scene Investigation</i> spin-off, but the actor, who has two degrees from Harvard and counts President <font color=yellow>Barack Obama</font> as a good friend, is also a best-selling author. His previous two books, <i>Letters to a Young Brother</i> and <i>Letters to a Young Sister</i>, reached out to African American youth, offering advice and encouragement for navigating the sometimes tricky waters of school, employment, financial burdens and the opposite sex. In his third offering, Harper turns his eye to adults, specifically romantic relationships between Black men and women. Harper sees a huge division between the sexes, particularly among African Americans, and attempts to bridge that gap with this honest and at times raw look at where Black men and women go wrong in the way they relate to each other... and offers up solutions for breaking down the walls between the sexes.<p>What makes Harper's book unique is that he draws from his own personal experience. Though he does rely on conversations and thoughts from people he knows (in the form of sections entitled "Black Men Speak" and "Sisters' Soiree Chat"), Harper takes a microscope to his own dating life as well, questioning why he himself is still single and laying bare some mistakes he's made. In the opening chapter of the book, Harper attends the 50th wedding anniversary party for parents of a friend's wife and meets a woman named Nichole at the gathering. A teacher based in DC and a single mom, Nichole and Harper really hit it off, but when he returned to L.A. it took Harper a month to call her. When he finally did, he found the connection they had shared was totally strained, but rather than giving up, Harper pressed on and decided to see if they could make it work, despite the odds against them.<p>Though Harper's book certainly has advice that is universal, it is geared towards African-American men and women. Harper points out the grim statistics for African American families: in 2006, fewer than 33\% of all African American children were being raised in two parent households... a 51\% decline from forty years earlier. Harper points out that when looking at Black families, the African American legacy, which is filled with centuries of slavery and oppression, can't be ignored. Harper finds that the fact that African Americans were literally denied the right to marry and raise their own children under slavery laws has contributed to the insecurity and fragility of many Black relationships today.<p><HR ALIGN="CENTER" SIZE="1" WIDTH="45\%" COLOR="#007BB5"><p>To read the full reviews, please click <A HREF="http://www.csifiles.com/reviews/csi/harper_the_conversation.shtml">here</A>.<center></center>
