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From Beirut to Jerusalem
Thomas L. Friedman
1989
Examines Israeli-Palestinian relations, the PLO, Israeli politics, Lebanese factions, news reporting from the Middle East, and other issues of the Middle East.
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That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World it Invented and How We Can Come Back
Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
2011
America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In this book the authors analyze those challenges, globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption, and spell out what needs to be done now to rediscover America's power and prowess. They explain how the end of the cold war blinded the nation to the need to address these issues seriously. They show how America's history, when properly understood, provides the key to coping successfully and explain how the paralysis of the U.S. political system and the erosion of key American values have made it impossible to carry out the policies the country needs. This work is both a searching exploration of the American condition today and a rousing manifesto for American renewal.
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21 Days to Awaken the Writer Within
Lisa Fugard
2012
How do you sustain your ideas and overcome self-doubt in your talents? How do you transmit your ideas so that the world will take notice? What techniques can you use to create discipline and make your writing sessions a joy? We live in exciting times in publishing: anyone with an idea and a computer can reach a worldwide audience, but how do you separate yourself from the thousands competing to be heard? 21 Days to Master Awakening the Writer Within is a warm, comforting guide to stepping into your new life as an empowered author. You'll learn how to generate more ideas, build confidence in your writing and take your manuscript to completion.
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Skinner's Drift: A Novel
Lisa Fugard
2006
Ten years after leaving South Africa, Eva van Rensburg returns to her dying father, a violent stuttering man whose terrible secret Eva has kept since she was a child, and to Skinner's Drift, the family farm, a tough stretch of land on the Limpopo River where jackals and leopards still roam.
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Transcendent Kingdom: A Novel
Yaa Gyasi
9-1-2020
A novel about faith, science, religion, and family that tells the deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief, narrated by a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford school of medicine studying the neural circuits of reward seeking behavior in mice.
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Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi
2016
Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle's women's dungeon, and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, where she will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the tribal wars of Ghana to slavery and Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the north to the Great Migration to the streets of 20th century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi's has written a modern masterpiece, a novel that moves through histories and geographies and--with outstanding economy and force--captures the troubled spirit of our own nation
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Delicious Foods: A Novel
James Hannaham
2015
Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace. Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promises of a good job and a rosy life. A shady company named Delicious Foods shuttles her to a remote farm, where she is held captive, performing hard labor in the fields to pay off the supposed debt for her food, lodging, and the constant stream of drugs the farm provides to her and the other unfortunates imprisoned there.
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God Says No
James Hannaham
2010
Gary Gray marries his first girlfriend, a fellow student from Central Florida Christian College who loves Disney World as much as he does. They are nineteen years old, God-fearing, and eager to start a family, but a week before their wedding Gary goes into a waffle house bathroom and lets something happen. God says no is his testimony--the story of a young Black Christian struggling with desire and belief, with his love for his wife and his appetite for other men, told in a singular, soulful voice. Driven by desperation and religious visions, the path that Gary Gray takes--from revival meetings to "out" life in Atlanta to a pray-away-the-gay ministry--gives a riveting picture of how a life like his can be lived, and how it can't.
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Kara Walker: Dust Jackets for the Niggerati
James Hannaham, Kara Walker, Hilton Als, and Christopher Stackhouse false
2013
African-American artist Kara Walker (born 1969) has been acclaimed internationally for her candid investigations of race, sexuality and violence through the lens of reconceived historical tropes. This publication documents 'Dust Jackets for the Niggerati –and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings Submitted Ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker', a major series of graphite drawings and hand-printed texts on paper that grew out of Walker’s attempts to understand how interpersonal and geopolitical powers are asserted through the lives of individuals.
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In the Valley of Mist: Kashmir: One Family in a Changing World
Justine Hardy
2009
Mohammed Dar and his three brothers were born in a boat on a lake in Kashmir, a place of exquisite beauty that was to become a war zone and nuclear flashpoint. This work tells their story of living through the destruction of their adored homeland.
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The Wonder House
Justine Hardy
2005
On Nagin lake in the Kashmir region of India is a house boat inhabited by a tough old widowed Englishwoman named Grace Singh. She lives with two Kashmiri women who care for her. Over the years Grace has seen her beautiful valley become disfigured by the territorial disputes between India and Pakistan. One day an English journalist comes to interview Grace concerning her life and forms a serious infatuation with her. This relationship threatens to change everything for the people in the houseboat.
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Bollywood Boy
Justine Hardy
2002
Welcome to Bollywood. This is studio city, a fantasy-fodder factory, the Bombay-based film capital of the Indian subcontinent. Here every year the Hindi film industry pumps out twice as many pictures as Hollywood to satisfy the romantic cravings of its billion-strong audience, from the mobile-wielding classes who sit in the air-conditioned comfort of big-city cinemas, to the villagers transfixed by dancing images flickering on a dusty courtyard wall. Enter Hrithik Roshan, new idol of the silver screen, seducing both the industry and the women of India in a flurry of triceps and biceps, tight T-shirts and slick dance moves. Bollywood Boy follows Hrithik's meteoric rise through the celluloid firmament. It could be straight from one of the film industry's own big-budget schlockbusters, with its heroes, heroines, villains, exotic locations, a cast of thousands, myriad constume changes and highly charged dop-de-bop dance routines. And like any good cinerama drama, there is the big chase scene as Justine tries to track down the man behind the hype, the hysteria and the silver disco suits.But there is a dark side to all of this, the moment when the lights go out and the hero stumbles - the moment in Bollywood when people die because they have not played by the underworld code. For beneath the glittering surface of India's tinsel town lurk shady racketeers who use the film industry to make serious black money. In Bombay, the underworld is king.
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Goat: A Story of Kashmir and Notting Hill
Justine Hardy
2000
A journalist based in India, Justine Hardy started trading pashmina shawls as a way of raising funds to support an education programme in some of Delhi's slum areas. This text tells the story of the goat hair, gathered from herds that graze among the high-altitude monasteries of Little Tibet, woven in villages near the Kashmiri border with Pakistan, and sold to ladies-who-lunch of London's Notting Hill.
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Scoop-Wallah: Life on a Delhi Daily
Justine Hardy
1999
A chance conversation with her greengrocer about the portrayal of India in the media inspired journalist Justine Hardy to leave London and spend a year working at the Indian Express in New Delhi. Her new life—with a quirky landlord who turns out to be a former Rajput prince—takes her all over India, from polo matches and the manicured lawns of Assam tea gardens to city slums in Delhi, stumbling across terrorist sentiments, exploring the HIV problem, and having an inspiring encounter with the Dalai Lama.
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The Ochre Border: A Journey through the Tibetan Frontierlands
Justine Hardy
1995
An account of the author's journey with three friends to a valley in the Himalayas, unvisited for 70 years. Situated on the Indo-Tiberian border, it is an area which is completely untouched by the modern world.
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What We Owe
Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde
2018
Nahid has six months left to live. Or so the doctors say. At fifty, she is no stranger to loss. But now, as she stands on the precipice of her own death—just as she has learned that her daughter Aram is pregnant with her first child—Nahid is filled with both new fury and long dormant rage. Her life back home in Iran, and living as a refugee in Sweden, has been about survival at any cost. How to actually live, she doesn’t know; she has never had the ability or opportunity to learn.
Here is an extraordinary story of exile, dislocation, and the emotional minefields between mothers and daughters; a story of love, guilt and dreams for a better future, vibrating with both sorrow and an unquenchable joie de vivre. With its startling honesty, dark wit, and irresistible momentum, What We Owe introduces a fierce and necessary new voice in international fiction.
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She Is Not Me
Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde
8-20-2015
She Is Not Me is a stunning Swedish debut novel about immigrant alienation. However, it is also a modern feminist depiction of what it's like to be a girl whose achievements can never match her ambition. The prose is electric and the story captivates from the very first page.
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Famous Drownings in Literary History: Essays on 21st Century Jewishness
Kevin Haworth
2012
What exactly does it mean to be young, Jewish and creative in 21st-century America? How do you reconcile a quiet life in the Midwest with a parallel life in Israel? And how do you fit in a five-year-old son with an interest in frilly dresses? Ohio professor and celebrated cultural essayist Kevin Haworth answers these questions and more in this, his debut full-length essay collection; and the answers are part Sloane Crosley, part Philip Roth, with a dash of Malcolm Gladwell's intelligence and a pinch of Denis Johnson's poetic style. Already the winner of a pre-publication grant from the Ohio Arts Council, from a former winner of the Samuel Goldberg Prize for Jewish fiction, this will be right up the alley of those who enjoy "The Believer" and "This American Life," a charming but darkly tinged look at circumcision, terrorist bombers, the Catskills in the '70s, and all the other confusing things that make up the life of post-9/11 Jewish American parents and artists.
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The Discontinuity of Small Things: A Novel
Kevin Haworth
2005
This quiet story of the Holocaust chronicles the lives of several Danes through the summer of 1943. It is the discontinuity of small things--the scattered inconveniences, chance meetings, glimpses of injustice, and indulgences of hope,--that haphazardly directs each individual to his fate. An hypnotic story of ordinary people caught in a silent maelstrom, ultimately driven to extraordinary feats.
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Lit from Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing
Kevin Haworth and Dinty W. Moore
2011
Lit from Within offers creative writers a window into the minds of some of America’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Witty, direct, and thought-provoking, these essays offer something to creative writers of all backgrounds and experience. With contributions from fiction writers, poets, and nonfiction writers, this is a collection of unusual breadth and quality.
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Tigerland: 1968-1969: A City Divided, a Nation Torn Apart, and a Magical Season of Healing
Wil Haygood
9-18-2018
Against the backdrop of one of the most tumultuous periods in recent American history, as riots and demonstrations spread across the nation, the Tigers of poor, segregated East High School in Columbus, Ohio did something no team from one school had ever done before: they won the state basketball and baseball championships in the same year. They defeated bigger, richer, whiter teams across the state and along the way brought blacks and whites together, eased a painful racial divide throughout the state, and overcame extraordinary obstacles on their road to success. In Tigerland, Wil Haygood gives us a spirited and stirring account of this improbable triumph and takes us deep into the personal lives of these local heroes. At the same time, he places the Tigers’ story in the context of the racially charged sixties, bringing in such national figures as Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Richard Nixon, all of whom had a connection to the teams and a direct effect on their mythical season.
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Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America
Wil Haygood
2015
Over the course of his forty-year career, Thurgood Marshall brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, and not only fought for human rights and human dignity but also made them impossible to deny in the courts and in the streets. In this galvanizing biography, award-winning author Wil Haygood uses the framework of the dramatic, contentious five-day Senate hearing to confirm Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice, to weave a provocative and moving look at Marshall’s life as well as at the politicians, lawyers, activists, and others who shaped—or desperately tried to stop—the civil rights movement. An authoritative account of one of the most transformative justices of the twentieth century, Showdown makes clear that it is impossible to overestimate Thurgood Marshall’s lasting influence on the racial politics of our nation.
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The Butler: A Witness to History
Wil Haygood
7-30-2013
From Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow Wil Haygood comes a mesmerizing inquiry into the life of Eugene Allen, the butler who ignited a nation's imagination and inspired a major motion picture: Lee Daniels' The Butler, the highly anticipated film that stars six Oscar winners, including Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey (honorary and nominee), Jane Fonda, Cuba Gooding Jr., Vanessa Redgrave, and Robin Williams; as well as Oscar nominee Terrence Howard, Mariah Carey, John Cusack, Lenny Kravitz, James Marsden, David Oyelowo, Alex Pettyfer, Alan Rickman, and Liev Schreiber.
With a foreword by the Academy Award nominated director Lee Daniels, The Butler not only explores Allen's life and service to eight American Presidents, from Truman to Reagan, but also includes an essay, in the vein of James Baldwin’s jewel The Devil Finds Work, that explores the history of black images on celluloid and in Hollywood, and fifty-seven pictures of Eugene Allen, his family, the presidents he served, and the remarkable cast of the movie.
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Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson
Wil Haygood
10-13-2009
Sugar Ray Robinson was not only one of the most iconic figures of the fight game; almost all sportswriters agree that he was the greatest boxer of all time. This illuminating biography grounds the spectacular story of Robinson’s rise to greatness within the context of the fighter’s life and times. Born Walker Smith Jr. in 1921, Robinson’s early childhood was marked by the seething racial tensions and explosive race riots that infected the Midwest throughout the twenties and thirties. After his mother moved him and his sisters to the relative safety of Harlem, he came of age in the vibrant post-Renaissance years. It was there that--encouraged to box by his mother, who wanted him off the streets--he soon became a rising star, cutting an electrifying, glamorous figure, riding around town in his famous pink Cadillac. Beyond the celebrity, though, Robinson would emerge as a powerful, often controversial black symbol in a rapidly changing America.
From Robinson’s gruesome six-bout war with Jake “Raging Bull” LaMotta and his lethal meeting with Jimmy Doyle to his Harlem nightclub years and thwarted show-biz dreams, Haygood brings the champion’s story, in the ring and out, powerfully to life against a vividly painted backdrop of the world he captivated.
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In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.
Wil Haygood
10-7-2003
He was, for decades, one of the most recognizable figures in the cultural landscape, his image epitomizing a golden age of American show business. His career spanned a lifetime, but for years he has remained hidden behind the persona he so vigorously generated, and so fiercely protected. Now, in this surprising, illuminating, and compulsively readable biography, we are taken beyond the icon, into the extraordinary, singular life of Sammy Davis, Jr.
In scrupulous detail and with stunning powers of evocation, Wil Haygood takes us back to the era of vaudeville, where it all began for four-year-old Sammy who ran out onstage one night and stole the show. From then on it was a motherless childhood on the road, singing and dancing his way across a segregated America with his father and the formidable showman Will Mastin, struggling together to survive the Depression and the demise of vaudeville itself.
With an ambition honed by poverty and an obsessive need for applause, Sammy drove his way into the nightclub circuit of the 1940s and 1950s, when, his father and Mastin aging and out of style, he slowly began to make a name for himself, hustling his way to top billing and eventually to recording contracts. From there, he was to stake his claim on Broadway, in Hollywood, and, of course, in Las Vegas.
Haygood brings Sammy’s showbiz life into full relief against the backdrop of an America in the throes of racial change. Sammy grew up trapped between the worlds of blacks and whites, with so much invested in both. He made his living entertaining white people but was often denied service in the very venues he played. Drafted into a newly integrated U.S. Army in the 1940s, he saw up close the fierce tensions that seethed below the surface. Dragged into the civil rights movement, he witnessed a hatred that often erupted into violence. In his broad and varied friendships and alliances (with Frank Sinatra; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Richard Nixon; Sidney Poitier; Marilyn Monroe, to name just a few), not to mention his romances (his relationship with Kim Novak and his marriage to the blond beauty May Britt drew death threats), he forged uncharted paths across racial lines. Admired and reviled by both blacks and whites, he was tormented all his life by raging insecurities, and never quite came to terms with his own skin. Ultimately, his only true sense of his identity was as a performer.
Based on painstaking research and more than 250 interviews, Wil Haygood brings us a sweeping and vivid cultural history of the twentieth century, chronicling black entertainment from its beginnings and the birth of popular culture as we know it. In Black and White transcends simple biography to become an important record, both celebratory and elegiacal, of a vanished America and its greatest entertainer.
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