Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America


Patrick Phillips - 2016
    Many black residents were poor sharecroppers, but others owned their own farms and the land on which they’d founded the county’s thriving black churches.But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. One man was dragged from a jail cell and lynched on the town square, two teenagers were hung after a one-day trial, and soon bands of white “night riders” launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to “abandoned” land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten.National Book Award finalist Patrick Phillips tells Forsyth’s tragic story in vivid detail and traces its long history of racial violence all the way back to antebellum Georgia. Recalling his own childhood in the 1970s and ’80s, Phillips sheds light on the communal crimes of his hometown and the violent means by which locals kept Forsyth “all white” well into the 1990s.Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth’s racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, Phillips breaks a century-long silence and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century.

Red Zone: China's Challenge and Australia's Future


Peter Hartcher - 2021
    

Stuff That Needs to Be Said: Essential Words on Life, Death, Faith, Politics, Love, and Giving a Damn


John Pavlovitz - 2020
    This expansive, like-hearted community transcends race, orientation, gender, religious tradition, political affiliation, and nation of origin--and finds its affinity in the deeper place of our shared humanity, which is the True North of his writing. This collection lovingly pulls together some of John's most widely-read and most beloved essays on faith, politics, grief, and the elemental parts of being human. It is an encouraging, inspiring, challenging storehouse of "stuff that needs to be said."

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League


Jeff Hobbs - 2014
    His charismatic father was later convicted of a double murder. Peace's intellectual brilliance and hard-won determination earned him a full scholarship to Yale University. At college, while majoring in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, he straddled the world of academia and the world of the street, never revealing his full self in either place. Upon graduation from Yale, he went home to teach at the Catholic high school he'd attended, slid into the drug trade, and was brutally murdered at age thirty.That's the short version of Robert Peace's life. The long version, the complete version, is this remarkable tour de force by Jeff Hobbs, a talented young novelist who was Peace's college roommate. Hobbs attended Peace's funeral, reached out to his friends from both Yale and Newark, and ultimately decided to write this harrowing and beautiful account of his life.What does the haunting, untimely death of one man mean? Robert Peace's life doesn't reduce to easy sociological constructions. Through Hobbs's relentless research and remarkable writing, we learn the cost of living between the world Peace was born into and the one his potential allowed him to enter. We see him work, love, fail, succeed, give to others, care for his mother, travel, and dream. We witness the decisions he made for himself and the ones that life forced upon him. But most importantly, we come to understand the sheer complexity of his existence and are irrevocably changed by the fascinating, devastating, and unforgettable life of Robert Peace.

Beyond the Game: The Collected Sportswriting of Gary Smith


Gary Smith - 2000
    In Beyond the Game, Gary Smith has brought together his greatest stories, from the inspiring account of basketball coach Jim Valvano's courageous battle against cancer, to an unforgettable tale of a remote valley in Bolivia that plays host to an unusual annual ritual in which the men of rival villages engage in a riotous all-day fistfight. Beyond the Game is not only a collection of great sportswriting; it is a collection of great writing, period. Each of Smith's stories -- of dreams and fears, failure and triumph, self-destruction and salvation -- will profoundly touch you and remain with you long after you have closed the pages of the book.

Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside


Nick Offerman - 2021
    The bedrock, the topsoil, and everything in between that generates the health of your local watershed. In his new book, Nick takes a humorous, inspiring, and elucidating trip to America's trails, farms, and frontier to celebrate the people, landscape, and stories, both historical and fresh, that have made it great.The seeds of this book were planted in 2019, when Nick took two memorable journeys with friends--a hiking trip to Glacier National Park with his friends Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders, as well as an extended visit to his friend James Rebanks, the author of A Shepherd's Life and English Pastoral. He followed that up with an excursion that could only have come about in 2020--Nick and his wife, Megan Mullally, bought an Airstream trailer to drive across the US in late 2020. All three journeys inspired some "deep-ish thinking from Nick, about the history and philosophy of our relationship with nature in our national parks, in our farming, and in our wildlife; what we mean when we talk about conservation; the importance of outdoor recreation; and the healthy building of both local and national communities across party lines, all subjects very close to Nick's heart.With witty, heartwarming stories, and a keen insight into the problems we all confront, this is both a ramble through and celebration of the land we all love.

Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South


Beth Macy - 2016
    George and Willie Muse were two little boys born to a sharecropper family. One day a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world and change their lives forever.Captured into the circus, the Muse brothers performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined over a dozen sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. They were global superstars in a pre-broadcast era. But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume: supposed cannibals, sheep-headed freaks, even "Ambassadors from Mars." Back home, their mother never accepted that they were "gone" and spent 28 years trying to get them back. Through hundreds of interviews and decades of research, Beth Macy expertly explores a central and difficult question: Where were the brothers better off? On the world stage as stars or in poverty at home? Truevine is a compelling narrative rich in historical detail and rife with implications to race relations today.

The Last of the President's Men


Bob Woodward - 2015
    Woodward reveals the untold story of Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed the secret White House taping system that changed history and led to Nixon’s resignation. In forty-six hours of interviews with Butterfield, supported by thousands of documents, many of them original and not in the presidential archives and libraries, Woodward has uncovered new dimensions of Nixon’s secrets, obsessions and deceptions.The Last of the President’s Men could not be more timely and relevant as voters question how much do we know about those who are now seeking the presidency in 2016—what really drives them, how do they really make decisions, who do they surround themselves with, and what are their true political and personal values?

The Grace of Silence: A Memoir


Michele Norris - 2010
    She would, she thought, base her book on the frank disclosures of others on the subject, but she was soon disabused of her presumption when forced to confront the fact that “the conversation” in her own family had not been forthright. Norris unearthed painful family secrets that compelled her to question her own self-understanding: from her father’s shooting by a Birmingham police officer weeks after his discharge from the navy at the conclusion of World War II to her maternal grandmother’s peddling pancake mix as an itinerant Aunt Jemima to white farm women in the Midwest. In what became a profoundly personal and bracing journey into her family’s past, Norris traveled from her childhood home in Minneapolis to her ancestral roots in the Deep South to explore the reasons for the “things left unsaid” by her father and mother when she was growing up, the better to come to terms with her own identity. Along the way she discovered how her character was forged by both revelation and silence. Extraordinary for Norris’s candor in examining her own racial legacy and what it means to be an American, The Grace of Silence is also informed by rigorous research in its evocation of time and place, scores of interviews with ordinary folk, and wise observations about evolving attitudes, at once encouraging and disturbing, toward race in America today. For its particularity and universality, it is powerfully moving, a tour de force.

Face the Nation: My Favorite Stories from the First 50 Years of the Award-Winning News Broadcast


Bob Schieffer - 2004
     With his critically acclaimed memoir This Just In, Schieffer proved himself a natural storyteller, a gifted writer able to capture the workings of television news with remarkable wit and insight. Now Schieffer focuses his keen reporter's eye on 50 years of Face the Nation's live broadcasts and the historic moments the program has captured. From its 1954 debut, an interview with Senator Joe McCarthy the day before the Senate debate that would condemn him, to the broadcast's 1957 groundbreaking interview with a candid and controversial Nikita Khrushchev; from the brilliant analysis of communism made by guest Martin Luther King Jr. to the sometimes stunning, always revealing interviews with each sitting president; from the heroic and moving coverage of the terrorist attacks of September 11 to the revolutionary coverage of the war in Iraq, Schieffer shares unforgettable anecdotes about the guests, the stories and the events captured by the venerable public affairs program. Marked by the author's candid personal observations and wise, good humor, and featuring a special companion DVD of broadcast highlights created by CBS News for this edition, Bob Schieffer's look at 50 years of Face the Nation shines an entertaining and nostalgic light on America's presidents, culture, foreign policy and domestic affairs.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity


Katherine Boo - 2012
    Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter - Annawadi's "most-everything girl" - will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call "the full enjoy." But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.

Slow Cooker Recipes Cookbook: Crock Pot Dump Meals, Low Carb, Weight Loss Diet, Fix-It and Forget-It #SAYNOTODIET #LOWCARBFOODS #WEIGHTLOSS #DUMPMEALS


Clark Weber - 2017
    I am chef and I am a Chef in New York. These are the Slow Cooker recipes that I like most. I learned some of the recipes in this cookbook from different friends and relatives. I tried all of them myself and the results were fabulous. I would also like to mention that I included in this cookbook only those recipes which are fairly easy to cook, even though I have to admit that most of them will be ready in more than a couple of hours. This because slow cooked meals need more cooking time compared to classic meals. The advantage comes from the fact that the slow cooking process is healthier and adds a great flavor. Furthermore, I selected only the healthiest Slow Cooker recipes that will provide you with a balanced diet. The number of calories rarely goes beyond 500/ serving (2000-2500 calories/ day intake is recommended for a sedentary adult that needs to maintain his/ her current weight), therefore these are some recipes that will help you maintain or even lose some weight. I also tried to collect here only the low carb recipes, because low carbs meals are great for dieting.

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde


Audre Lorde - 2020
    This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems—selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender, Roxane Gay.Among the essays included here are:• "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"• "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"• "I Am Your Sister"• Excerpts from the American Book Award–winning A Burst of LightThe poems are drawn from Lorde’s nine volumes, including The Black Unicorn and National Book Award finalist From a Land Where Other People Live. Among them are:• "Martha"• "A Litany for Survival"• "Sister Outsider"• "Making Love to Concrete"

The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo


John Garnaut - 2012
    Now, as the Party's 18th National Congress oversees the biggest leadership transition in decades, and installs the Bo family's long-time rival Xi Jinping as president, China's rulers are finding it increasingly difficult to keep their poisonous internal divisions behind closed doors.Bo Xilai's breathtaking fall from grace is an extraordinary tale of excess, murder, defection, political purges and ideological clashes going back to Mao himself, as the princeling sons of the revolutionary heroes ascend to control of the Party. China watcher John Garnaut examines how Bo's stellar rise through the ranks troubled his more reformist peers, as he revived anti-'capitalist roader' sentiment, even while his family and associates enjoyed the more open economy's opportunities. Amid fears his imminent elevation to the powerful Standing Committee was leading China towards another destructive Cultural Revolution, have his opponents seized their chance now to destroy Bo and what he stands for? The trigger was his wife Gu Kailai's apparently paranoid murder of an English family friend, which exposed the corruption and brutality of Bo's outwardly successful administration of the massive city of Chongqing. It also led to the one of the highest-level attempted defections in Communist China's history when Bo's right-hand man, police chief Wang Lijun, tried to escape the ruins of his sponsor's reputation.Garnaut explains how this incredible glimpse into the very personal power struggles within the CCP exposes the myth of the unified one-party state. With China approaching super-power status, today's leadership shuffle may set the tone for international relations for decades. Here, Garnaut reveals a particularly Chinese spin on the old adage that the personal is political.

Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero


David Sandison - 2006
    A charismatic, funny, articulate, and formidably intelligent man, Cassady was also a compulsive womanizer who lived life on the edge. His naturalistic, conversational writing style inspired Kerouac, who lifted a number of passages verbatim and uncredited from Cassady’s letters for significant episodes in On the Road. Drawing on a wealth of new research and with full cooperation from central figures in his life—including Carolyn Cassady and Ken Kesey—this account captures Cassady’s unique blend of inspired lunacy and deep spirituality.