Enrique's Journey


Sonia Nazario - 2005
    When Enrique is five years old, his mother, Lourdes, too poor to feed her children, leaves Honduras to work in the United States. The move allows her to send money back home to Enrique so he can eat better and go to school past the third grade.Lourdes promises Enrique she will return quickly. But she struggles in America. Years pass. He begs for his mother to come back. Without her, he becomes lonely and troubled. When she calls, Lourdes tells him to be patient. Enrique despairs of ever seeing her again. After eleven years apart, he decides he will go find her.Enrique sets off alone from Tegucigalpa, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother's North Carolina telephone number. Without money, he will make the dangerous and illegal trek up the length of Mexico the only way he can – clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains.With gritty determination and a deep longing to be by his mother's side, Enrique travels through hostile, unknown worlds. Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte- The Train of Death. Enrique pushes forward using his wit, courage, and hope - and the kindness of strangers. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States.Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, Enrique's Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.

Black Power: Three Books from Exile: The Color Curtain / Black Power / White Man, Listen!


Richard Wright - 1974
    It speaks eloquently of empowerment and possibility, and resonates loudly to this day.Also included in this omnibus edition are White Man, Listen!, a stirring collection of Wright's essays on race, politics, and other essential social concerns ("Deserves to be read with utmost seriousness"-New York Times), and The Color Curtain, an indispensable work urging the removal of the color barrier. It remains one of the key commentaries on the question of race in the modern era. ("Truth-telling will perhaps always be unpopular and suspect, but in The Color Curtain, as in all his later nonfiction, Wright did not hesitate to tell the truth as he saw it."--Amritjit  Singh, Ohio University)

The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power


Max Boot - 2002
    Beginning with Jefferson's expedition against the Barbary Pirates, Max Boot tells the exciting stories of our sometimes minor but often bloody landings in Samoa, the Philippines, China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. Along the way he sketches colorful portraits of little-known military heroes such as Stephen Decatur, "Fighting Fred" Funston, and Smedley Butler. From 1800 to the present day, such undeclared wars have made up the vast majority of our military engagements. Yet the military has often resisted preparing itself for small wars, preferring instead to train for big conflicts that seldom come. Boot re-examines the tragedy of Vietnam through a "small war" prism. He concludes with a devastating critique of the Powell Doctrine and a convincing argument that the armed forces must reorient themselves to better handle small-war missions, because such clashes are an inevitable result of America's far-flung imperial responsibilities.

The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad


Lesley Hazleton - 2013
    In The First Muslim, Lesley Hazleton brings him vibrantly to life. Drawing on early eyewitness sources and on history, politics, religion, and psychology, she renders him as a man in full, in all his complexity and vitality.        Hazleton’s account follows the arc of Muhammad’s rise from powerlessness to power, from anonymity to renown, from insignificance to lasting significance. How did a child shunted to the margins end up revolutionizing his world? How did a merchant come to challenge the established order with a new vision of social justice? How did the pariah hounded out of Mecca turn exile into a new and victorious beginning? How did the outsider become the ultimate insider?        Impeccably researched and thrillingly readable, Hazleton’s narrative creates vivid insight into a man navigating between idealism and pragmatism, faith and politics, nonviolence and violence, rejection and acclaim. The First Muslim illuminates not only an immensely significant figure but his lastingly relevant legacy.

Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember: An Oral History


James Mellon - 1988
    Bullwhip Days is a remarkable compendium of selections from these extraordinary interviews, providing an unflinching portrait of the world of government-sanctioned slavery of Africans in America. Here are twenty-nine full narrations, as well as nine sections of excerpts related to particular aspects of slave life, from religion to plantation life to the Reconstruction era. Skillfully edited, these chronicles bear eloquent witness to the trials of slaves in America, reveal the wide range of conditions of human bondage, and provide sobering insight into the roots of racism in today's society.

African Presence in Early Asia


Runoko Rashidi - 1970
    Presenting their case with persuasive eloquence and research, the authors examine cultural forms, art motifs, weapons, scripts, and skeletal evidence to link Asian civilizations to Africa's Nile Valley. Articles detail both the physical and cultural presence of Africans in Asia. Topics covered include the black presence and heavy intermittent influence in Sumer, Elam, and Arabia; contributions of Dravidians and Ethiopian blacks to the Indus Valley civilizations; the history of first Chinese emperor, Fu-Hsi; the origin of martial arts; parallels between Krishna, Guatama Buddha, and Jesus; and the nature of slavery in Arabia and Asia. Five major chapters have been added to this new edition, adding substantially to the range and depth of the original volume.

Justice and Remembrance: Introducing the Spirituality of Imam Ali


Reza Shah-Kazemi - 2006
    Abi Talib, son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, first Shi'i imam and fourth caliph, is a monumental figure within the Islamic tradition. But despite the immense importance of Imam Ali, there is a dearth of literature in Western languages about his life and thought. This book -- the first serious engagement in English with the intellectual principles underpinning his teachings -- is therefore a welcome and valuable addition to the sources available. It consists of three parts. Part one introduces the person of Ali in a general manner, and focuses particularly on the spiritual and ethical content of his teachings. Part two evaluates Ali's "sacred conception of justice" Part three addresses the theme of spiritual realization through the remembrance of God, the central mystical practice of the Sufis. Justice and Remembrance will be of great value to students and scholars of Islamic thought, as well as to those interested in the relationship between spirituality and ethics.

Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America


Nathan McCall - 1994
    Yet by the age of fifteen, McCall was packing a gun and embarking on a criminal career that five years later would land him in prison for armed robbery.In these pages, McCall chronicles his passage from the street to the prison yard--and, later, to the newsrooms of The Washington Post and ultimately to the faculty of Emory University. His story is at once devastating and inspiring, at once an indictment and an elegy. Makes Me Wanna Holler became an instant classic when it was first published in 1994 and it continues to bear witness to the great troubles--and the great hopes--of our nation. With a new afterword by the author

The Black Panthers Speak


Philip S. Foner - 1970
    With cartoons, flyers, and articles by Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, this collection endures as an essential part of civil-rights history.

A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story


Elaine Brown - 1992
    More than a journey through a turbulent time in American history, this is the story of a black woman's battle to define herself.

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness


Simone Browne - 2015
    She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.

A Short History of England


Simon Jenkins - 2011
    Its triumphs and disasters are instantly familiar, from the Norman Conquest to the two world wars, but to fully understand their significance we need to know the whole story.A Short History of England sheds light on all the key individuals and events, bringing them together in an enlightening and engaging account of the country's birth, rise to global prominence and then partial eclipse.

W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919


David Levering Lewis - 1993
    This monumental biography--eight years in the research and writing--treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fifty-year period that demonstrates how Du Bois changed forever the way Americans think about themselves.

The Dark Side of Islam


R.C. Sproul - 2003
    It is one of the fastest-growing religions in the world. Newspapers and television news regularly bring stories from the Middle East, but more importantly, the Muslim world has come to us. Between 5 and 7 million Muslims currently live in America, and that number is growing.Recognizing the importance of understanding Islam, R. C. Sproul and Abdul Saleeb had a series of conversations about how Islam differs from the Christian faith, and those conversations became the basis for this book. As a convert from Islam, Saleeb has spent many years studying Islam and Christianity. With Dr. Sproul he focuses on four basic areas in which Islam rejects the very foundations on which Christianity is built:the nature and authority of the Bible the nature of God the character of humankind the deity and sacrificial death of Christ Sproul and Saleeb will help you understand Islam better and give you an intellectual basis for answering the Muslim faith-perhaps when interacting with Muslims in your own neighborhood or city. In addition to discussing the differences between Islam and Christianity, Saleeb gives his own perspective on the "dark side" of Islam in light of violence perpetrated by Muslim extremists in recent years.

The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics


Orin Starn - 1995
    Nineteenth-century travelers wrote of soaring Andean peaks plunging into luxuriant Amazonian canyons of orchids, pythons, and jaguars. The early-twentieth-century American adventurer Hiram Bingham told of the raging rivers and the wild jungles he traversed on his way to rediscovering the “Lost City of the Incas,” Machu Picchu. Seventy years later, news crews from ABC and CBS traveled to Peru to report on merciless terrorists, starving peasants, and Colombian drug runners in the “white gold” rush of the coca trade. As often as not, Peru has been portrayed in broad extremes: as the land of the richest treasures, the bloodiest conquest, the most poignant ballads, and the most violent revolutionaries. This revised and updated second edition of the bestselling Peru Reader offers a deeper understanding of the complex country that lies behind these claims.Unparalleled in scope, the volume covers Peru’s history from its extraordinary pre-Columbian civilizations to its citizens’ twenty-first-century struggles to achieve dignity and justice in a multicultural nation where Andean, African, Amazonian, Asian, and European traditions meet. The collection presents a vast array of essays, folklore, historical documents, poetry, songs, short stories, autobiographical accounts, and photographs. Works by contemporary Peruvian intellectuals and politicians appear alongside accounts of those whose voices are less often heard—peasants, street vendors, maids, Amazonian Indians, and African-Peruvians. Including some of the most insightful pieces of Western journalism and scholarship about Peru, the selections provide the traveler and specialist alike with a thorough introduction to the country’s astonishing past and challenging present.