Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.

There's a boom in genealogy now. With ancestry.com and other sites digitizing so many of the records, you can now find things in a few minutes that used to take months.

In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include.

Instill respect for teachers.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it's fascinating.

Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have. . . This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down.

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.