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Editor's Choice
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Of
Blood And Sorrow: A Tamara Hayle Mystery
by Valerie Wilson Wesley
Valerie Wilson
Wesley’s private investigator, Tamara Hayle, whom the Houston
Chronicle calls “smart, sexy, tough but tender,” has earned
enthusiastic acclaim from reviewers and readers alike. Now Newark,
New Jersey’s savviest detective confronts the one case she never saw
coming–and discovers how ties that bind can easily become a noose.
Tamara Hayle can’t
believe that her life is this good. New York’s most powerful
businessman wants her to work for him, her new lover seems caring
and supportive, and her son, Jamal, is thriving. But as Tamara
sardonically observes, “When things stir that easy, there’s always
something lumpy at the bottom of the pot.”
Enter Lilah Love, an
old acquaintance who begs Tamara to find her missing child. Tamara,
however, is wary of Lilah, who attracts mayhem and murder like an
alley cat attracts fleas. Next up is Basil Dupre, Tamara’s outlaw
ex-lover, who always brings passion–and chaos–when he strolls into
Tamara’s life. Suddenly Tamara’s safe world isn’t so secure,
especially when Jamal witnesses a brutal murder and becomes the
prime suspect.
As the body count
rises, Tamara and Jamal will follow a long-forgotten secret into a
terrifying confrontation with love gone bad, trust turned lethal,
and a past hungry to claim more lives.
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April 4, 1968: Martin
Luther King Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America
by Michael
Eric Dyson
On April 4, 1968, at 6:01 PM, while
he was standing on a balcony at a Memphis hotel, Martin Luther King,
Jr. was shot and fatally wounded. Only hours earlier King—the
prophet for racial and economic justice in America—ended his final
speech with the words, “I may not get there with you, but I want you
to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”
Acclaimed public intellectual and best-selling author Michael Eric
Dyson uses the fortieth anniversary of King’s assassination as the
occasion for a provocative and fresh examination of how King fought,
and faced, his own death, and we should use his death and legacy.
Dyson also uses this landmark anniversary as the starting point for
a comprehensive reevaluation of the fate of Black America over the
four decades that followed King’s death. Dyson ambitiously
investigates the ways in which African-Americans have in fact made
it to the Promised Land of which King spoke, while shining a bright
light on the ways in which the nation has faltered in the quest for
racial justice. He also probes the virtues and flaws of charismatic
black leadership that has followed in King’s wake, from Jesse
Jackson to Barack Obama.
Always engaging and inspiring, April 4, 1968 celebrates the
prophetic leadership of Dr. King, and challenges America to renew
its commitment to his deeply moral vision.
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Honey Flava
by Zane
Honey Flava features an erotic feast of
short stories with enough Asian flava to ignite fireworks. With an
African American and Asian mix of sexy characters, Zane picks the most
clever and bold male and female writers to deliver a collection like no
other. Stories like Geisha Girl and Pins and Needles give tea and
acupuncture a whole new meaning, and the word "Master" is a term of
endearment in The Meaning of Zhuren. In tantalizing portraits of some of
the hottest -- and sweetest -- scenes you'll ever want to experience,
Honey Flava will take you to a sensual paradise of no return.
Zane delivers a new and special taste,
proving that passion and sensuality have truly universal meaning.
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Sold
by
Patricia McCormick
Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who
lives with her family in a small hut in a mountain village in Nepal. Her
life is made up of simple pleasures like going to school and spending
time with her loving ama and baby brother. But these happy times are
undercut by the desperate poverty that threatens the lives of the
villagers.
Then one day, Lakshmi's father brings her
to a shopkeeper in town and tells Lakshmi that she is going to go work
as a maid in India so that her wages can be sent home. Glad to help
support her family, Lakshmi undertakes the long journey and arrives at
"Happiness House" full of hope. But she soon discovers the unthinkable
truth: she has been sold into prostitution.
An old woman named Mumtaz rules the house
with an iron fist. She informs Lakshmi that she is trapped there until
she can pay off her family's debt. And of course, crooked Mumtaz will
make sure that that never happens.
Lakshmi's life becomes a nightmare from
which she cannot escape. But gradually, she forms friendships that
enable her to survive in this terrifying new world. Until the day comes
that she has to make a decision -- one that will cause her to risk
everything for a chance to reclaim her life.
Written in spare and evocative vignettes,
this powerful novel chronicles the story of one girl's struggle to
maintain her sense of self against all odds.
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Gang Leader for a Day: A
Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
by Sudhir Venkatesh
The story of the young sociologist who
studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the
world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang
Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh
managed to gain entrée into the gang, what he learned, and how his
method revolutionized the academic establishment.
When Venkatesh walked into an abandoned
building in one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects, he was
looking for people to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty. A
first-year grad student, he would befriend a gang leader named JT and
spend the better part of the next decade inside the projects under JT's
protection, documenting what he saw there.
Over the next seven years, Venkatesh
observed JT and the rest of the gang as they operated their crack
selling business, conducted PR within their community, and rose up or
fell within the ranks of the gang's complex organizational structure.
Gang Leader for a Day is an inside view
into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to
survive in an urban war zone. It is also the story of a complicated
friendship between two young and ambitious men, a universe apart. |
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Romare Bearden: A Black
Odyssey
by Robert O'Meally, Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden (1911-1988) had a true
Renaissance sensibility. He was a fine artist who also successfully
turned his hand to printmaking, writing, costume and set design, as well
as composing jazz music. In addition, he helped to found the Studio
Museum in Harlem, New York's Cinque Gallery and the Black Academy of
Arts and Letters, and was once even offered an opportunity to play
professional baseball for the Philadelphia Athletics. But it is for his
rich and textured collages that Bearden is best known today. In 1977,
Bearden created a sequence of 20 collages based on episodes from Homer's
Odyssey. It may come as a surprise to even his most avid followers that
this devoted chronicler of African American culture and the Harlem
Renaissance would gravitate to such a canonical text. But in the essay
accompanying Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, scholar Robert G. O'Meally
argues for their thematic consistency and suggests that, in the figures
of Odysseus, Penelope, Poseidon, Nausicca and others, Bearden found
themes sympathetic to the African American experience. These motifs of
wandering, mourning and the questing for home--considering Bearden's
scores of interiors and exteriors, country and city life and depictions
of family love--emerge as the central themes of all his art. Romare
Bearden: A Black Odyssey, the first in-depth consideration of these
collages since they were originally exhibited 30 years ago, will prove a
surprise to Bearden fans and newcomers alike. |
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The Lost Supreme: The Life
of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard
by Peter Benjaminson
In the months before she died, Florence
Ballard, the spunky teenager who founded the most successful female
vocal group in history—the Supremes—told her own side of the story.
Recorded on tape, Flo shed light on all areas of her life, including the
surprising identity of the man by whom she was raped prior to entering
the music business, the details of her love–hate relationship with
Motown Records czar Berry Gordy, her drinking problem and pleas for
help, a never-ending desire to be the Supremes’ lead singer, and her
attempts to get her life back on track after being brutally expelled
from group. This is a tumultuous and heartbreaking story of a
world-famous performer whose life ended at the age of 32 as a lonely
mother of three who had only recently recovered from years of poverty
and despair.
Peter Benjaminson is the author of Death
in the Afternoon: America’s Newspaper Giants Struggle for Survival,
Secret Police: Inside the New York City Department of Investigation, and
The Story of Motown, and is the coauthor of Investigative Reporting. He
is a former reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the
Detroit Free Press. |
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Black Widow: A Novel
by Nikki Turner
#1 bestselling author Nikki Turner
returns with an explosive new novel about a woman at an emotional
crossroads–and the men left in her wake.
Isis Tatum knows firsthand the way love
can mess up a person. After all, she saw her mother drive a truck
through the home of her father’s mistress before killing her dad. And
ever since Isis was a teenager, her love life has been a series of
disasters: Her first sweetheart was executed by the state of Virginia,
and her next lover was sent to jail for murder. Now Isis is a successful
jewelry designer, but she remains a failure with men. When she meets
Logic, a Las Vegas high roller who treats her like a princess, Isis
reckons she’s finally struck gold–literally. Logic sees to it that her
custom pieces of jewelry are seen on the hottest rap stars and pro
athletes.
But when this Mr. Right ends up in jail
too, Isis starts to believe that she’s cursed, that she’s a true Black
Widow. Always one to roll with the punches, she embraces her life and
walks bravely down all its twisted paths, taking her business to
unprecedented heights while letting the men who dare to get involved
with her take their chances.
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Turning White: A Memoir of
Change
by Lee Thomas
In his thought-provoking memoir, Turning
White, Emmy Award-winning TV broadcaster Lee Thomas shares the physical
and mental battle he is waging with vitiligo a skin disorder that is
literally turning him white.
At age 25, Thomas had a dream job in a
dream city as a feature/entertainment reporter for the ABC networks
flagship TV station in New York. Then he discovered a few white spots on
his scalp, the small beginnings of a disease that has spread to half his
face -- a fact he covers with makeup when on camera.
As someone in the very public eye,
vitiligo has transformed not only Thomas' color, but his life. "Even
people who have known me for years avoid eye contact when they see my
face without makeup for the first time," he writes.
Recently, Thomas turned the spotlight on
himself during a special report for WJBK FOX 2 Detroit, where he is
currently an entertainment reporter.
In Turning White, Thomas shares his
journey to help people understand vitiligo, and to help others cope with
the psychological war that comes from this life-changing disease.
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Song Yet Sung
by James McBride
From the New York Times-bestselling
author of The Color of Water comes a powerful page-turner about a
runaway slave and a determined slave catcher.
Nowhere has the drama of American slavery
played itself out with more tension than in the dripping swamps of
Maryland's eastern shore, where abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass
and Harriet Tubman, born less than thirty miles apart, faced off against
nefarious slave traders in a catch-me-if-you-can game that fueled fear
and brought economic hardship to both white and black families. Trapped
in the middle were the watermen, a group of America's most original and
colorful pioneers, poor oystermen who often found themselves caught
between the needs of rich plantation owners and the roaring Chesapeake,
which often claimed their lives.
The powerful web of relationships in a
small Chesapeake Bay town collapses as two souls face off in a gripping
page-turner. Liz Spocott, a young runaway who has odd dreams about the
future of the colored race, mistakenly inspires a breakout from the
prison attic of a notorious slave thief named Patty Cannon. As Cannon
stokes revenge, Liz flees into the nefarious world of the underground
railroad with its double meanings and unspoken clues to freedom known to
the slaves of Dorchester County as "The Code." Denwood Long, a troubled
slave catcher and eastern shore waterman, is coaxed out of retirement to
break "The Code" and track down Liz.
Filled with rich history-much of the
story is drawn from historical events-and told in McBride's signature
lyrical storytelling style, Song Yet Sung brings into full view a world
long misunderstood in American fiction: how slavery worked, and the
haunting, moral choices that lived beneath the surface, pressing both
whites and blacks to search for relief in a world where both seemed to
lose their moral compass. This is a story of tragic triumph, violent
decisions, and unexpected kindness.
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Jewels: 50 Phenomenal Black
Women Over 50
by Michael Cunningham, Connie Briscoe
Jewels celebrates the spirit and
achievements of mature African American women.
Photographer Michael Cunningham (coauthor
of Crowns) and author Connie Briscoe, a New York Times bestselling
novelist, profile fifty women over the age of fifty who have been
remarkably successful—whether in reaching the top of the corporate
ladder, finding fame in politics or the arts, or raising a son to be
proud of a single mother—and reveal the ways that they have prevailed
despite daunting obstacles. Their stories are paired with Cunningham's
intimate portraits of the women.
Jewels includes well-known and
little-known women alike—from teachers and executives to artists,
authors, and entertainers. Among the celebrities profiled in the book
are Ruby Dee, Eleanor Holmes Norton, S. Epatha Merkerson, and Marian
Wright Edelman. Coauthor Connie Briscoe also appears here as one of the
featured Jewels, telling her inspiring personal story. World-renowned
poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator Nikki Giovanni
contributes an original poem to the book.
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One in a Million
by Kimberla Lawson Roby
In the first novella by the New York
Times bestselling author of the Reverend Curtis Black series, a wife and
a husband receive a surprise that will change their lives forever
Kennedi Mason thinks she's the luckiest
woman on earth. She loves her job, she has a wonderful best friend, and
she's been married for ten years to her soul mate. There's nothing she
can think of that could make her life any better.
Then one fateful day Kennedi receives a
piece of news that will turn her world upside down. She's excited about
it, and she knows that her husband, Blake, will be over the moon. He has
always dreamed of this one thing happening, and she can't wait until he
comes home so she can tell him.
But when she sees Blake that evening, he
has a special announcement of his own. It shocks Kennedi into silence
and wipes the admission she was planning to make right out of her mind.
In an instant, her life and her marriage have changed, but not at all in
the way that she had expected.
A poignant and satisfying story of hope,
Kimberla Lawson Roby's One in a Million beautifully shows us the
difference between what we think we want and what we actually need to be
truly happy.
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Pop: A Celebration of Black
Fatherhood
by Carol Ross
In 51 visually stunning, emotionally
compelling portraits, acclaimed photographer Carol Ross presents a
hopeful, heartwarming, and caring view of black fatherhood in the United
States. In an era that pays little positive attention to black fathers,
Ross's inspirational perspective on the relationships between black men
and their children is vitally important-and long overdue.
Ross's richly textured duotone
photographs reveal a group of devoted fathers whose common bond is their
profound love for their children. For her subjects, Ross has selected
men from all walks of life-college professors, filmmakers, technicians,
construction workers, and corporate executives-along with well-known
music executives, directors, entertainers, and actors, such as Antonio
L. A. Reid, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Funk Master Flex, Doug E. Doug, and
Melvin Van Peebles. Film star Samuel L. Jackson, photographed with his
daughter, provides the book's foreword, and each portrait is accompanied
by a poignant personal recollection by the father depicted.
Exquisitely designed, Pop: A Celebration
of Black Fatherhood finally gives black men their own voice about their
experience as fathers. Inspired by her own father, Ross's book is, in
her words, "a round of applause, a bow, a 'God bless you,'" to all
those fathers who "take their children to that place where, one day,
they can fly on their own." |
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