Unscripted


Ken Leiker - 2003
    This record of World Wrestling Entertainment explores the inner workings of the WWE and the day-to-day lives of its stars.

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America


Peggy Pascoe - 2009
    Peggy Pascoe demonstrates how these laws were enacted and applied not just in the South but throughout most of the country, in the West, the North, and the Midwest. Beginning in the Reconstruction era, when the term miscegenation first was coined, she traces the creation of a racial hierarchy that bolstered white supremacy and banned the marriage of Whites to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as the marriage of Whites to Blacks. She ends not simply with the landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws throughout the country, but looks at the implications of ideas of colorblindness that replaced them. What Comes Naturally is both accessible to the general reader and informative to the specialist, a rare feat for an original work of history based on archival research.

Call Us What We Carry


Amanda Gorman - 2021
    Call Us What We Carry is Gorman at her finest. Including “The Hill We Climb,” the stirring poem read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, and bursting with musical language and exploring themes of identity, grief, and memory, this lyric of hope and healing captures an important moment in our country’s consciousness while being utterly timeless.The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman.

The President Sang Amazing Grace: A Book About Finding Grace After Unspeakable Tragedy


Zoe Mulford - 2019
    Singer/songwriter Zoe Mulford was so moved that she wrote the song “The President Sang Amazing Grace,” which was then illustrated by filmmaker and painter Jeff Scher for a video that has been viewed countless times. This book presents the lyrics to the song, Scher’s paintings, excerpts from Obama’s eulogy, biographies of those who were killed, historical context, and sheet music.

Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America


James Allen - 2000
    This is probably a small percentage of these murders, which were seldom reported, and led to the creation of the NAACP in 1909, an organization dedicated to passing federal anti-lynching laws. Through all this terror and carnage someone -- many times a professional photographer -- carried a camera and took pictures of the events. These lynching photographs were often made into postcards and sold as souvenirs to the crowds in attendance. These images are some of photography's most brutal, surviving to this day so that we may now look back on the terrorism unleashed on America's African-American community and perhaps know our history and ourselves better. The almost one hundred images reproduced here are a testament to the camera's ability to make us remember what we often choose to forget.

The Pocketknife Bible: The Poems and Art of Anis Mojgani


Anis Mojgani - 2015
    For the first time, Mojgani has given us a collection which combines his poems with his illustrations, at times using them to infuse and inform one another. The poems and pictures of The Pocketknife Bible climb through the child-like heart of its author to bring stories from the well that are enhanced by the imagery. This book is a celebration of childhood and family, or rather the mythology of what that entails, exploring the intersection of how we may have once seen the world and how we remember how we saw it. This is an almost-children s book for those who might no longer be young, but could use a map to find their way back to that world."

Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life


bell hooks - 1991
    Creating a spiritual, progressive, feminist, and ultimately organic definition of Black intellectuality, they passionately discuss issues ranging in subject matter from theology and the Left, to contemporary music, film, and fashion.

Cindy Sherman: Retrospective


Cindy Sherman - 1997
    Her art embodies two developments in the art world: the impact of postmodern theory on art practice; and the rise of photography and mass-media techniques as modes of artistic expression.

War Comes to Willy Freeman


James Lincoln Collier - 1983
    But even with the help of Sam Fraunces and her fellow worker, Horace, Willy knows that to be black, female, and free leaves her open to danger at every turn. What will tomorrow bring?

The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture


Bakari Kitwana - 2002
    The only in-depth study of the first generation to grow up in post-segregation America, it combines culture and politics into a pivotal work in American studies. Bakari Kitwana, one of black America's sharpest young critics, offers a sobering look at this generation's disproportionate social and political troubles, and celebrates the activism and politics that may herald the beginning of a new phase of African-American empowerment.

Calling Me Home


Julie Kibler - 2012
    Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favor to ask her hairdresser Dorrie Curtis. It's a big one. Isabelle wants Dorrie, a black single mom in her thirties, to drop everything to drive her from her home in Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati. With no clear explanation why. Tomorrow. Dorrie, fleeing problems of her own and curious whether she can unlock the secrets of Isabelle's guarded past, scarcely hesitates before agreeing, not knowing it will be a journey that changes both their lives. Over the years, Dorrie and Isabelle have developed more than just a business relationship. They are friends. But Dorrie, fretting over the new man in her life and her teenage son's irresponsible choices, still wonders why Isabelle chose her. Isabelle confesses that, as a willful teen in 1930s Kentucky, she fell deeply in love with Robert Prewitt, a would-be doctor and the black son of her family's housekeeper - in a town where blacks weren't allowed after dark. The tale of their forbidden relationship and its tragic consequences makes it clear Dorrie and Isabelle are headed for a gathering of the utmost importance and that the history of Isabelle's first and greatest love just might help Dorrie find her own way.

Ralph Ellison: A Biography


Arnold Rampersad - 2007
    Ellison went on to earn many other honors, including two presidential medals and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but his failure to publish a second novel, despite years of striving, haunted him for the rest of his life. Now, as the first scholar given complete access to Ellison's papers, Arnold Rampersad has written not only a reliable account of the main events of Ellison's life but also a complex, authoritative portrait of an unusual artist and human being. Born poor and soon fatherless in 1913, Ralph struggled both to belong to and to escape from the world of his childhood. We learn here about his sometimes happy, sometimes harrowing years growing up in Oklahoma City and attending Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Arriving in New York in 1936, he became a political radical before finally embracing the cosmopolitan intellectualism that would characterize his dazzling cultural essays, his eloquent interviews, and his historic novel. The second half of his long life brought both widespread critical acclaim and bitter disputes with many opponents, including black cultural nationalists outraged by what they saw as his elitism and misguided pride in his American citizenship. This biography describes a man of magnetic personality who counted Saul Bellow, Langston Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wright, Richard Wilbur, Albert Murray, and John Cheever among his closest friends; a man both admired and reviled, whose life and art were shaped mainly by his unyielding desire to produce magnificent art and by his resilient faith in the moral and cultural strength of America. A magisterial biography of Ralph Waldo Ellison--a revelation of the man, the writer, and his times.

Platon's Republic


Platon . - 2004
    Platon's subjects are all leaders in their field and include Al Pacino, Bill Clinton, Vivienne Westwood, Leonard Cohen and David Beckham. A collection of unique portraits by British born, New York based, fashion photographer Platon. Over 120 photographs have been selected from an enormous range of powerful images taken over the last decade and together they constitute a unique and dynamic cross-section through the cult of fame and power. and sometimes overwhelms, us with images of world-wide importance juxtaposed with frivolity. Platon's Republic replicates the same intense and sometimes surreal experience with portraits of Al Pacino, Bill Clinton, Vivienne Westwood, Leonard Cohen as well as more documentary photographs of Jesse Jackson and Bianca Jagger demonstrating against the death penalty and football supporters. Granted extraordinary access to some of the west's most powerful people, Platon's subjects are all leaders in their field. Whether they are from the TV industry, politicians, actors, fashion designers, writers or musicians, they all wield enormous influence within their arena. Platons' portraits are graphic and intimate, but the unusual angles and revealing expressions are his hallmark.

Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery


Na'im Akbar - 1996
    Na'im Akbar addresses these questions:" Are African-Americans still slaves ?" "Why can't Black folks get together ?" "What is the psychological consequences for Blacks and Whites of picturing God as a Caucasian ?"Learn how to break the chains of your mental slavery with this new book by one of the world's outstanding experts on the African American mind .

Whistling Past the Graveyard


Susan Crandall - 2013
    Born to teenage parents in Mississippi, Starla is being raised by a strict paternal grandmother, Mamie, whose worst fear is that Starla will turn out like her mother. Starla hasn’t seen her momma since she was three, but is convinced that her mother will keep her promise to take Starla and her daddy to Nashville, where her mother hopes to become a famous singer—and that one day her family will be whole and perfect.When Starla is grounded on the Fourth of July, she sneaks out to see the parade. After getting caught, Starla’s fear that Mamie will make good on her threats and send her to reform school cause her to panic and run away from home. Once out in the country, Starla is offered a ride by a black woman, Eula, who is traveling with a white baby. She happily accepts a ride, with the ultimate goal of reaching her mother in Nashville.As the two unlikely companions make their long and sometimes dangerous journey, Starla’s eyes are opened to the harsh realities of 1963 southern segregation. Through talks with Eula, reconnecting with her parents, and encountering a series of surprising misadventures, Starla learns to let go of long-held dreams and realizes family is forged from those who will sacrifice all for you, no matter if bound by blood or by the heart.