Book picks similar to
Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed-Race America by Mike Tauber
mixed
nonfiction
men-writers
wackynonfiction
The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority
Ellen D. Wu - 2013
As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership.Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders.By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, The Color of Success reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.
Earth Song: Inside Michael Jackson's Magnum Opus
Joseph Vogel - 2011
In both subject and sound, it was like nothing else on the radio. It defied the cynicism and apathy of Generation X; it challenged the aesthetic expectations for a "pop song" (or even a "protest song"), fusing blues, opera, rock and gospel; and it demanded accountability in an era of corporate greed, globalization and environmental indifference. A massive hit globally (reaching #1 in over fifteen countries), it wasn't even offered as a single in the United States. Yet nearly two decades later, it stands as one of Jackson's greatest artistic achievements. In this groundbreaking monograph, author Joseph Vogel details the song's context and evolution from its inception in Vienna in 1988, to its release and reception in 1995, to Jackson's final live performance in Munich in 1999. Based on original research, including interviews with the song's key participants, Earth Song: Inside Michael Jackson's Magnum Opus offers a fascinating reassessment of this prophetic musical statement.
Black Looks: Race and Representation
bell hooks - 1992
In these twelve essays, bell hooks digs ever deeper into the personal and political consequences of contemporary representations of race and ethnicity within a white supremacist culture.
Skinema
Chris Nieratko - 2007
As Johnny Knoxville so succinctly put it, Nieratko is an asshole, but whether Chris is rescuing a stalker from choking on her own vomit, getting his nose broken for having AIDS (he doesn't) or marrying the one woman that could put up with his insanity, his life sounds so much like a collection of hilarious bar stories it's impossible not to grab a beer and listen to the whole thing.
Weegee's World
Miles Barth - 2000
It captures bygone New York at its most raucous, dangerous, and outrageous. Grisly murders, tragic accidents, gawking crowds, along with intimate human-interest and high-society images, are all captured by Weegee's flash. Interpretive essays, an annotated chronology, bibliography, filmography, and a list of exhibitions complete this comprehensive volume.
Steve McQueen
William Claxton - 2000
But the star of such films as The Great Escape, Love with the Proper Stranger, Nevada Smith, The Getaway, and Papillon was largely a mystery off-screen. These photos, taken over a six-year period during the 1960s by one of the actor's best friends, show the hidden McQueen: tender, sensitive, and unpredictable.
The Chiffon Trenches
André Leon Talley - 2020
Propelled into the upper echelons by his knowledge and adoration of fashion, André moved to Paris as bureau chief of John Fairchild's Women's Wear Daily, befriending fashion's most important designers (Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta). But as André made friends, he also made enemies. A racially tinged encounter with a member of the house of Yves Saint Laurent sent him back to New York and into the offices of Vogue under Grace Mirabella.There, he eventually became creative director, developing an unlikely but intimate friendship with Anna Wintour. As she rose to the top of Vogue's masthead, André also ascended, and soon became the most influential man in fashion. The Chiffon Trenches offers a candid look at the who's who of the last fifty years of fashion. At once ruthless and empathetic, this engaging memoir tells with raw honesty the story of how André not only survived the brutal style landscape but thrived--despite racism, illicit rumors, and all the other challenges of this notoriously cutthroat industry--to become one of the most renowned voices and faces in fashion.Woven throughout the book are also André's own personal struggles that have impacted him over the decades, along with intimate stories of those he has turned to for inspiration (Diana Vreeland, Diane von Férstenberg, Lee Radziwill, to name a few), and of course his Southern roots and ongoing faith, which have guided him since childhood.
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday
Angela Y. Davis - 1998
Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture.The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith--published here in their entirety for the first time--Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.
Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
Ahmir Questlove Thompson - 2013
He digs deep into the album cuts of his life and unearths some pivotal moments in black art, hip hop, and pop culture.Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson is many things: virtuoso drummer, producer, arranger, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon bandleader, DJ, composer, and tireless Tweeter. He is one of our most ubiquitous cultural tastemakers, and in this, his first book, he reveals his own formative experiences--from growing up in 1970s West Philly as the son of a 1950s doo-wop singer, to finding his own way through the music world and ultimately co-founding and rising up with the Roots, a.k.a., the last hip hop band on Earth. Mo' Meta Blues also has some (many) random (or not) musings about the state of hip hop, the state of music criticism, the state of statements, as well as a plethora of run-ins with celebrities, idols, and fellow artists, from Stevie Wonder to KISS to D'Angelo to Jay-Z to Dave Chappelle to...you ever seen Prince roller-skate?!?But Mo' Meta Blues isn't just a memoir. It's a dialogue about the nature of memory and the idea of a post-modern black man saddled with some post-modern blues. It's a book that questions what a book like Mo' Meta Blues really is. It's the side wind of a one-of-a-kind mind.It's a rare gift that gives as well as takes.It's a record that keeps going around and around.
A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties
Suze Rotolo - 2008
It chronicles the back-story of Greenwich Village in the early days of the folk music explosion, when Dylan was honing his skills and she was in the ring with him.A shy girl from Queens, Suze Rotolo was the daughter of Italian working-class Communists. Growing up at the start of the Cold War and during McCarthyism, she inevitably became an outsider in her neighborhood and at school. Her childhood was turbulent, but Suze found solace in poetry, art, and music. In Washington Square Park, in Greenwich Village, she encountered like-minded friends who were also politically active. Then one hot day in July 1961, Suze met Bob Dylan, a rising young musician, at a folk concert at Riverside Church. She was seventeen, he was twenty; they were young, curious, and inseparable. During the years they were together, Dylan was transformed from an obscure folk singer into an uneasy spokesperson for a generation.Suze Rotolo’s story is rich in character and setting, filled with vivid memories of those tumultuous years of dramatic change and poignantly rising expectations when art, culture, and politics all seemed to be conspiring to bring our country a better, freer, richer, and more equitable life. She writes of her involvement with the civil rights movement and describes the sometimes frustrating experience of being a woman in a male-dominated culture, before women’s liberation changed the rules for the better. And she tells the wonderfully romantic story of her sweet but sometimes wrenching love affair and its eventual collapse under the pressures of growing fame.A Freewheelin’ Time is a vibrant, moving memoir of a hopeful time and place and of a vital subculture at its most creative. It communicates the excitement of youth, the heartbreak of young love, and the struggles for a brighter future.
Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White
Frank H. Wu - 2001
E. B. Du Bois, Cornel West, and others who confronted the "color line" of the twentieth century, journalist, scholar, and activist Frank H. Wu offers a unique perspective on how changing ideas of racial identity will affect race relations in the twenty-first century. Wu examines affirmative action, globalization, immigration, and other controversial contemporary issues through the lens of the Asian-American experience. Mixing personal anecdotes, legal cases, and journalistic reporting, Wu confronts damaging Asian-American stereotypes such as "the model minority" and "the perpetual foreigner." By offering new ways of thinking about race in American society, Wu's work dares us to make good on our great democratic experiment.
Hapa Girl: A Memoir
May-lee Chai - 2007
In "Hapa Girl" (hapa is Hawaiian for mixed) their daughter tells the story of this loving family as they moved from Southern California to New York to a South Dakota farm by the 1980s. In their new Midwestern home, the family finds itself the object of unwelcome attention, which swiftly escalates to violence. The Chais are suddenly socially isolated and barely able to cope with the tension that arises from daily incidents of racial animosity, including random acts of cruelty.May-lee Chai's memoir ends in China, where she arrives just in time to witness a riot and demonstrations. Here she realizes that the rural Americans' "fears of change, of economic uncertainty, of racial anxiety, of the unknowable future compared to the known past were the same as China's. And I realized finally that it had not been my fault."
Tuna Melts My Heart: The Underdog with the Overbite
Courtney Dasher - 2015
Now the charming and unconventional pooch has his own book, filled with more than a hundred all-new photographs and witty commentary to give fans an intimate and hilarious look at the Internet’s most prized pup. Tuna’s cartoonish looks—with an exaggerated overbite, a recessed jawline, and a wrinkly neck—are truly one of a kind. And yet his quirky appearance is no match for his unique perspective on life, overcoming his proclivity for staying in bed all day to keep his eye on the (bacon-flavored) prize. Teaming up with his owner, Courtney Dasher, Tuna shares a behind-the-scenes look at his daily exploits, which include sleeping, sunbathing, wearing bow ties, playing with toys, and melting hearts. Packed with witty and endearing images of this ridiculously adorable pup, Tuna Melts My Heart is sure to delight the underdogs in us all!
John Lennon: The New York Years
Bob Gruen - 2005
Presents a summary of the innovative musician's life during his nine years in New York City, together with a collection of 150 full-color photographs and reminiscences on the stories behind the photographs.
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
Timothy Egan - 2011
He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents, vaudeville stars, leading thinkers. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his Great Idea: to capture on film the continent’s original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.An Indiana Jones with a camera, Curtis spent the next three decades traveling from the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the Acoma on a high mesa in New Mexico to the Salish in the rugged Northwest rain forest, documenting the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes. It took tremendous perseverance - ten years alone to persuade the Hopi to allow him into their Snake Dance ceremony. And the undertaking changed him profoundly, from detached observer to outraged advocate. Eventually Curtis took more than 40,000 photographs, preserved 10,000 audio recordings, and is credited with making the first narrative documentary film. In the process, the charming rogue with the grade school education created the most definitive archive of the American Indian. His most powerful backer was Theodore Roosevelt, and his patron was J. P. Morgan. Despite the friends in high places, he was always broke and often disparaged as an upstart in pursuit of an impossible dream. He completed his masterwork in 1930, when he published the last of the twenty volumes. A nation in the grips of the Depression ignored it. But today rare Curtis photogravures bring high prices at auction, and he is hailed as a visionary. In the end he fulfilled his promise: He made the Indians live forever.