Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong; and her best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bonded as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South. These third-generation daughters of the Great Migration come of age in the 1970s, in the warm glow of the recent civil rights movement. It has offered them a promise that they will have more opportunities, rights, and freedoms than any generation of Black Americans in history. But the girls have much more immediate concerns: hiding under the dining room table and eavesdropping on grown folks’ business; collecting secret treasures; and daydreaming about their futures. And then fate intervenes, sending them careening in wildly different directions. There’s heartbreak, loss, displacement, and even murder. Three Girls from Bronzeville is a memoir that chronicles Dawn’s attempt to find answers. It’s a celebration of sisterhood, a testimony to the unique struggles of Black women, and a tour-de-force about the complex interplay of race, class, and opportunity, and how those forces shape our lives and our capacity for resilience and redemption.

    Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this now classic autobiography, is how much he was a man.

    Refusing to cave in to society's rules, Eleanor's exuberant style, wavering voice and lack of Hollywood beauty are fodder for the media.First Lady for thirteen years, Eleanor redefines and exploits this role to a position ofpower. Using her influence she champions for Jews, African Americans and women. Living through two world wars Eleanor witnesses thousands of graves, broken bodies and grieving families. After visiting troops in the Pacific she says:"If we don't make this a more decent world to live in I don't see how we can look these boys in the eyes."She defies a post-war return to status quo and establishes the Universal Declarationof Human Rights within the U.N. She earns her way to being named "First Lady of the World." The audacity of this woman to live out her own destiny challenges us to do the same. After all, it's not about Eleanor. Her story is history.  It's about us.

    In 'Destined to Witness', Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir -- an astonishing true tale of how he came of age as a black child in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, due to concerns about his fragile health, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to school; like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Führer's spell. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door -- or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi's account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence.

    Louis World’s Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging the slight 103-pound, 4-foot 11-inch tall man with an orangutan. The attraction became an international sensation, drawing thousands of New Yorkers and commanding headlines from across the nation and Europe.Spectacle explores the circumstances of Ota Benga’s captivity, the international controversy it inspired, and his efforts to adjust to American life. It also reveals why, decades later, the man most responsible for his exploitation would be hailed as his friend and savior, while those who truly fought for Ota have been banished to the shadows of history. Using primary historical documents, Pamela Newkirk traces Ota’s tragic life, from Africa to St. Louis to New York, and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived out the remainder of his short life.Illuminating this unimaginable event, Spectacle charts the evolution of science and race relations in New York City during the early years of the twentieth century, exploring this racially fraught era for Africa-Americans and the rising tide of political disenfranchisement and social scorn they endured, forty years after the end of the Civil War. Shocking and compelling Spectacle is a masterful work of social history that raises difficult questions about racial prejudice and discrimination that continue to haunt us today.

    Ordained at twelve, he would eventually become the first Buddhist chaplain at an American university, the founder of a retreat center and monastery, and a bestselling author. Here, Bhante G. lays bare the often-surprising ups and downs of his seventy-five years, from his boyhood in Sri Lanka to his decades of sharing the insights of the Buddha, telling his story with the "plain-English" approach for which he is so renowned.

    In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood—and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.

    Putnam to her consuming quest for avaiation fame.

    Malcolm X battled the horrifying legacy of African American slavery throughout his short life. Malcolm's passage from troubled boy to influential, outspoken man and finally to tragic hero is captured in the drawings of the award-winning graphic artist Randy DuBurke, and the heartrending history of the era is distilled to its essence by Andrew Helfer, editor of two Eisner Award-winning books. This is American history as you've never seen it before.

    It was a harrowing test of endurance on a snowbound cordillera that ended in a miraculous rescue. Now comes the unflinching and emotional true story by one of the men who found his way home.Four decades after the tragedy, a climber discovered survivor Eduardo Strauch’s wallet near the memorialized crash site and returned it to him. It was a gesture that compelled Strauch to finally “break the silence of the mountains.”In this revelatory and rewarding memoir, Strauch withholds nothing as he reveals the truth behind the life-changing events that challenged him physically and tested him spiritually, but would never destroy him. In revisiting the horror story we thought we knew, Strauch shares the lessons gleaned from far outside the realm of rational learning: how surviving on the mountain, in the face of its fierce, unforgiving power and desolate beauty, forever altered his perception of love, friendship, death, fear, loss, and hope.

    Drawing from the private archives of the poet's estate and numerous interviews, Alexis De Veaux demystifies Lorde's iconic status, charting her conservative childhood in Harlem; her early marriage to a white, gay man with whom she had two children; her emergence as an outspoken black feminist lesbian; and her canonization as a seminal poet of American literature.

    A new, wide world opened for Francois — but one which also required him to make painful personal choices, and sacrifices.From New York to the Soviet Union, Berlin to California, Clemmons has performed for audiences around the world, and remains a beloved figure. Evocative and intimate, and buoyed by its author’s own vivacious, inimitable energy, Officer Clemmons chronicles a historical and enlightening life and career of a man who has brought joy to millions of adults and children, across generations and borders.

    But there is more to Chloe than viewers see on the TV, and the drama doesn’t stop when the camera stops rolling. Just two years ago, Chloe was a single mother struggling to make ends meet doing a string of jobs she hated and wondering if she would ever find happiness. Since joining the cast of The Only Way Is Essex, her life is now a whirlwind of glitzy parties and jet-set holidays, but life hasn’t always dealt Chloe a good hand. Her story is one of triumph over adversity, with plenty of laughs along the way. From her turbulent childhood where she was raised by a neighbor after her mother abandoned her, to battling with bullies and struggling with an eating disorder, to the magical moment when she met the man of her dreams.

    He became one of the ten richest men on the planet and controlled 80 per cent of the global cocaine trade before he was shot dead in 1993.In 1965, a secret mission by Colombian Special Forces, led by an MI6 agent, to recover a cash hoard from a safe house used by a young Pablo Escobar culminates in a shoot-out leaving many dead. Escobar and several of his men escape. Only a baby survives, Roberto Sendoya Escobar. In a bizarre twist of fate, the MI6 agent takes pity on the child, brings him home and later adopts him.Over the years, Pablo Escobar tries, repeatedly, to kidnap his son. The child, unaware of his true identity, is allowed regular meetings with Escobar and it becomes apparent that Roberto’s adopted father and the British government are working covertly with the gangster in an attempt to control the money laundering and drug trades.Many years later in England, as Roberto’s father lies dying in hospital, he hands his son a coded piece of paper which, he says, reveals the secret hiding place of Escobar’s ‘missing millions'. The code is published in this book for the first time.

    Kelly illuminates the radical subjects--slavery, poverty, feminism, the Church, evolution, among them--considered treasonous at the time, that Austen deftly explored in the six novels that have come to embody an age. The author reveals just how in the novels we find the real Jane Austen: a clever, clear-sighted woman "of information," fully aware of what was going on in the world and sure about what she thought of it. We see a writer who understood that the novel--until then seen as mindless "trash"--could be a great art form and who, perhaps more than any other writer up to that time, imbued it with its particular greatness.