Showing titles in Black & African American

Bloomsbury presents Back to Black written and read by Kehinde Andrews. Back to Black seeks to show us the long, powerful and painful history of Black radical politics. Born out of resistance to slavery and colonialism, its rich past encompasses figures such as Marcus Garvey, Angela Davis, the...

Based on a seven-year study of 1,000 of the wealthiest African Americans, The Wealth Choice offers a trove of sound and surprising advice about climbing the economic ladder, even when the odds seem stacked against you. Listeners will learn about how business leaders, entrepreneurs, and celebrities like Bob Johnson, Spike Lee, L. A. Reid, Herman Cain, T. D. Jakes, and Tyrese Gibson found their paths to wealth; what they did or didn't learn about money early on; what they had to sacrifice to get to the top; and the role of discipline in managing their success. 

This psychologist is frustrated. In the final stretch of his doctoral internship, Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter had just one more milestone to complete—the diversity project—where candidates insert themselves into a situation in which they’d experience what it’s like to be a minority...

Elaine Brown assumed her role as the first and only female leader of the Black Panther Party with these words: “I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?” It was August 1974. From a small Oakland-based cell, the Panthers had grown to become a revolutionary national organization. How Brown came to a position of power over this paramilitary, male-dominated organization, and what she did with that power, is a riveting, unsparing account of self-discovery.

Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this bestselling spiritual classic. This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to be treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman...

A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind. The abolition of...

For readers of Ace and Belly of the Beast: A Black queer feminist exploration of asexuality--and an incisive interrogation of the sex-obsessed culture that invisibilizes and ignores asexual and A-spec identity. Everything you know about sex and asexuality is (probably) wrong. The notion that...

One woman's extraordinary personal journey in the United States military and her triumphant effort to honor her predecessors with the Congressional Gold Medal Looking back on her remarkable career, Retired Army Colonel Edna W. Cummings can justly say that "the odds ain't good, but good stuff...

Slaves to Fashion is a cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art world. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora.

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale.

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women's faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery.

Run a Google search for “black girls” - what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls”, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities.

Part memoir by the daughter of the iconic comedian Richard Pryor, part exploration of the historical and contemporary use of the N-word, this hybrid book peels back the curtain on the life of Pryor and interrogates the most perplexing word in the American lexicon, a word he helped popularize...

This national best-seller chronicles the true story of two brothers coming of age in the Henry Horner public housing complex in Chicago. Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers are 11 and nine years old when the story begins in the summer of 1987. Living with their mother and six siblings, they struggle against grinding poverty, gun violence, gang influences, overzealous police officers, and overburdened and neglectful bureaucracies. Immersed in their lives for two years, Kotlowitz brings us this classic rendering of growing up poor in America’s cities.

Published during a literary era marked by the ascendance of Black writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alex Haley, this thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown’s childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s.

This audiobook contains the voices of Black prima ballerina Lydia Abarca Mitchell, founding Dance Theatre of Harlem member Shelia Rohan, daughter of late founding member Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Khadija Tariyan McKinney-Griffith, and first-generation dancers Karlya Shelton-Benjamin and Marcia...

Considered by many to be a founder of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra - a.k.a. Herman Blount - was a composer, keyboardist, bandleader, philosopher, entrepreneur, poet, and self-proclaimed extraterrestrial from Saturn. He recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. 

This fascinating distillation of a great leader's experience is published here. 

This is a concise history, intended for travellers, but of inestimable value to anyone looking for an overview of the Caribbean and its mainland coastal states, with a focus on the past few centuries. The history of the Caribbean does not make much sense without factoring in the cities - Pensacola, New Orleans, Galveston - and the ambitions of the states on its continental shores, notably the United States. This account is grounded in a look at the currents and channels of the sea, and its constraints, followed by the history of 'pre-contact' civilisations.

This stunning cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery offers up lessons from the natural world shared through the stories of long-lived trees. “[Melinda] Sewak’s inspiring narration, combined with her storytelling prowess and dedication to historical...