I Can Only Love A Thug


Antoinette Sherell - 2019
    Determined to make sure Mischana and his mother were fed, Kiru did the only thing any young man in his position would do; he hit the blocks. However, he had no idea how deep Mischana’s troubles really ran, and she was forced away before he had the chance to find out. Years later, Mischana is still being dealt bad hands. With an abusive boyfriend and a secret she’s been harboring for ten years, she runs to the one place she thought she’d never return. What she wasn’t expecting was to also find the one person she thought she’d never see again... Kiru. Determined to keep her close this time around, Kiru is more than willing to handle all her troubles. Will he be able to save her from her past life, or will her past only bring chaos into his?

Ratchet Wives Club: Atlanta Edition


N'Dia Rae - 2017
    Infidelity. Greed. Wives of Atlanta's Biggest Ballers... All holding dark secrets...they're ratchet! Aria Married to ATL's biggest kingpin Czar, she is a paraplegic confined to the wheelchair for life after one of her husband's rivals shoots her. Still bitter about her predicament she cheats on Czar with Nokio, her husband's corner boy, and plots to take over his empire. Cipirana. Gorgeous BBW that's not appreciated by her husband Braxton, who is soon to be the mayor of Atlanta. After years of neglect, disrespect and abuse from Braxton she she takes comfort in Javi, Czar's right hand man. Apryl. She is Cipriana's little sister and an undercover detective cop. Apryl is also the wife of a former cop turned law school student by the name of Kazman. When Kazman is struck in a car accident and placed in a coma, Apryl is left to pay all of their bills. To help she takes on extra undercover work, investigating Czar. When she meets Czar she is immediately attracted to the powerful kingpin. But what about her husband in the coma? Mayeka Is a former stripper turned baby mama to one of the city's most powerful men, Braxton Nicks. Braxton Nicks is a councilman running for mayor who is also married to Cipriana. As Mayeka's son get's older the more she wants Braxton all to her self but she she is hiding a dark secret from him too. All four women's lives are entangled in this juicy tale of drama, lust and secrets. Are you ready for this crazy rollercoaster ride?

Tempted Off His Love


Tay Mo'Nae - 2020
    

Poland: A History


Adam Zamoyski - 2009
    This substantially revised and updated edition sets the Soviet era in the context of the rise, fall and remarkable rebirth of an indomitable nation.

Spain: The Centre of the World 1519-1682


Robert Goodwin - 2015
    It was a time of discovery and adventure, of great political and social change--it was a time when Spain learned to rule the world.Assembling a spectacular cast of legendary characters like the Duke of Alba, El Greco, Miguel de Cervantes, and Diego Velázquez, Robert Goodwin brings the Spanish Golden Age to life with the vivid clarity and gripping narrative of an epic novel. From scholars and playwrights, to poets and soldiers, Goodwin is in complete command of the history of this tumultuous and exciting period. But the superstars alone will not tell the whole tale--Goodwin delves deep to find previously unrecorded sources and accounts of how Spain's Golden Age would unfold, and ultimately, unravel.Spain is a sweeping and revealing portrait of Spain at the height of its power and a world at the dawn of the modern age.

Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine


Kelley Fanto Deetz - 2017
    Although these images are sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represent the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nation's culinary and hospitality traditions even as they were forced to prepare food for their oppressors.Kelley Fanto Deetz draws upon archaeological evidence, cookbooks, plantation records, and folklore to present a nuanced study of the lives of enslaved plantation cooks from colonial times through emancipation and beyond. She reveals how these men and women were literally -bound to the fire- as they lived and worked in the sweltering and often fetid conditions of plantation house kitchens. These highly skilled cooks drew upon skills and ingredients brought with them from their African homelands to create complex, labor-intensive dishes such as oyster stew, gumbo, and fried fish. However, their white owners overwhelmingly received the credit for their creations.Focusing on enslaved cooks at Virginia plantations including Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and George Washington's Mount Vernon, Deetz restores these forgotten figures to their rightful place in American and Southern history. Bound to the Fire not only uncovers their rich and complex stories and illuminates their role in plantation culture, but it celebrates their living legacy with the recipes that they created and passed down to future generations.

On Painting


Leon Battista Alberti
    Inspired by the order and beauty inherent in nature, his groundbreaking work sets out the principles of distance, dimension and proportion; instructs the painter on how to use the rules of composition, representation, light and colour to create work that is graceful and pleasing to the eye; and stipulates the moral and artistic pre-requisites of the successful painter. On Painting had an immediate and profound influence on Italian Renaissance artists including Ghiberti, Fra Angelico and Veneziano and on later figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, and remains a compelling theory of art.

Ain't Nothing Like A Brooklyn Bitch


Kellz Kimberly - 2015
     At Seventeen years of age and fresh out of high school, Royal has had to work at a local strip club to make sure that she and her sister have whatever they need in order to maintain. Royal is all about making money and looking for a way out. There isn’t anyone that she has her eyes set on until she ends up meeting Pharaoh while returning home one night. At first, she downplays their blossoming relationship letting it be known that they’re just friends. Pharaoh plays along and figures that she’s just not your average chick, but he quickly switches things up on her and starts dating a girl name Bia. Just like Pharaoh knew she would, Royal shuts that relationship down and claims Pharaoh as her own. With a Love so unique and seemingly everlasting, one would think that things would be smooth sailing for the two of them. However, with a scorned ex-lover and a jealous best friend, the outcome will not turn out pretty. Join Royal as she carries the weight of the world on her shoulders and does what only a Brooklyn Bitch can do to make it out alive.

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture


Vincent Woodard - 2014
    Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person’s claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence. The Delectable Negro explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture.Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L. Smith’s slave narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in the nineteenth century, Woodard traces the racial assumptions, political aspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both European and white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh. Woodard uses these texts to unpack how slaves struggled not only against social consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation and hunger designed to break them. He concludes with an examination of the controversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which to describe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.

London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World's Most Vibrant City


Steve Roud - 2008
    In the process, it shows how the story of Dick Whittington and his cat has connections with the ancient Middle East, explains why lions rather than ravens at the Tower of London were once felt to be inextricably bound up with the city’s fate, and pinpoints precisely where the story of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, was first recorded. Exploring everything from local superstitions, to ghost stories, to annual customs, this is an enchanting guide to the ancient legends and deep-rooted beliefs that can be found the length and breadth of the city.

Narrative of Sojourner Truth


Sojourner Truth - 1850
    history, Sojourner Truth sang, preached, and debated at camp meetings across the country, led by her devotion to the antislavery movement and her ardent pursuit of women's rights. Born into slavery in 1797, Truth fled from bondage some 30 years later to become a powerful figure in the progressive movements reshaping American society.This remarkable narrative, first published in 1850, offers a rare glimpse into the little-documented world of Northern slavery. Truth recounts her life as a slave in rural New York, her separation from her family, her religious conversion, and her life as a traveling preacher during the 1840s. She also describes her work as a social reformer, counselor of former slaves, and sponsor of a black migration to the West.A spellbinding orator and implacable prophet, Truth mesmerized audiences with her tales of life in bondage and with her moving renditions of Methodist hymns and her own songs. Frederick Douglass described her message as a "strange compound of wit and wisdom, of wild enthusiasm, and flint-like common sense." This inspiring account of a black woman's struggles for racial and sexual equality is essential reading for students of American history, as well as for those interested in the continuing quest for equality of opportunity.

The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat


Paul Lendvai - 1999
    Much of Europe once knew them as "child-devouring cannibals" and "bloodthirsty Huns." But it wasn't long before the Hungarians became steadfast defenders of the Christian West and fought heroic freedom struggles against the Tatars (1241), the Turks (16-18th centuries), and, among others, the Russians (1848-49 and 1956). Paul Lendvai tells the fascinating story of how the Hungarians, despite a string of catastrophes and their linguistic and cultural isolation, have survived as a nation-state for more than 1,000 years.Lendvai, who fled Hungary in 1957, traces Hungarian politics, culture, economics, and emotions from the Magyars' dramatic entry into the Carpathian Basin in 896 to the brink of the post-Cold War era. Hungarians are ever pondering what being Hungarian means and where they came from. Yet, argues Lendvai, Hungarian national identity is not only about ancestry or language but also an emotional sense of belonging. Hungary's famous poet-patriot, S�ndor Petofi, was of Slovak descent, and Franz Liszt felt deeply Hungarian though he spoke only a few words of Hungarian. Through colorful anecdotes of heroes and traitors, victors and victims, geniuses and imposters, based in part on original archival research, Lendvai conveys the multifaceted interplay, on the grand stage of Hungarian history, of progressivism and economic modernization versus intolerance and narrow-minded nationalism.He movingly describes the national trauma inflicted by the transfer of the historic Hungarian heartland of Transylvania to Romania under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920--a trauma that the passing of years has by no means lessened. The horrors of Nazi and Soviet Communist domination were no less appalling, as Lendvai's restrained account makes clear, but are now part of history.An unforgettable blend of eminent readability, vibrant humor, and meticulous scholarship, The Hungarians is a book without taboos or prejudices that at the same time offers an authoritative key to understanding how and why this isolated corner of Europe produced such a galaxy of great scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs.

Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time


Adrian Miller - 2013
    Focusing each chapter on the culinary and social history of one dish--such as fried chicken, chitlins, yams, greens, and red drinks--Miller uncovers how it got on the soul food plate and what it means for African American culture and identity.Miller argues that the story is more complex and surprising than commonly thought. Four centuries in the making, and fusing European, Native American, and West African cuisines, soul food--in all its fried, pork-infused, and sugary glory--is but one aspect of African American culinary heritage. Miller discusses how soul food has become incorporated into American culture and explores its connections to identity politics, bad health raps, and healthier alternatives. This refreshing look at one of America's most celebrated, mythologized, and maligned cuisines is enriched by spirited sidebars, photographs, and twenty-two recipes.

Glow


Jessica Maria Tuccelli - 2012
    Eleven-year-old Ella McGee sits on a bus bound for her Southern hometown. Behind her in Washington, D.C., lie the broken pieces of her parents’ love story—a black father drafted, an activist mother an activist mother of Scotch-Irish and Cherokee descent confronting racist thugs. But Ella’s journey is just beginning when she reaches Hopewell County, and her disappearance into the Georgia mountains will unfurl a rich tapestry of family secrets spanning a century. Told in five unforgettable voices, Glow reaches back through the generations, from the red-clay dust of the Great Depression to the Blue Ridge frontier of 1836, where slave plantations adjoin the haunted glades of a razed Cherokee Nation. Out of these characters’ lives evolves a drama that is at once intimately human and majestic in its power to call upon the great themes of our time—race, identity, and the bonds of family and community.Lushly conceived, cinematically detailed, and epic in historical scope, Glow announces an extraordinary new voice in Southern fiction.

A Spy Called James: The True Story of James Lafayette, Revolutionary War Double Agent


Anne Rockwell - 2016
    Told for the first time in picture book form is the true story of James Armistead Lafayette, a slave who spied for George Washington's army during the American Revolution, and whose personal fight for freedom began with America's liberation.