The best books about Harlem

What is my book about?

Mama Mable was my first-ever children’s book, and it was also an important lesson in the challenges of telling complex stories. With so many men away at war, the 1940s saw a rise in all-female jazz ensembles (like the International Sweethearts of Rhythm or Babe Egan and the Hollywood Redheads) who for the first time were able to tour the country as professional musicians. These women broke barriers of race, class, and gender and yet many of their stories remain untold.

The band in my book is fictional, but each character is inspired by a real female musician of that era- in the hopes of bringing attention to the many women who contributed to this amazing time in music history.

What is my book about?

The Most Dazzling Girl in Berlin is a historical novel-in-verse about 18-year-old Hilde, just released from a Berlin orphanage, ready to make her way in the world. She stumbles into Café Lila, a queer club full of love and music, and meets Rosa, the club’s waitress and performer. 

But it’s 1932, and Berlin is in turmoil. Between elections, protests in the streets, and the growing unrest in Café Lila itself, Hilde will have to decide what’s best for her future…and what it means to love a place that will soon be changed forever.

What is my book about?

Short stories fit a busy woman’s clock. They inspire and educate and, in other lives, we learn something of our own. These modern women grapple with life choices, vacillating between reason and passion:

A grieving businesswoman seeks connection with a stranger. A cerebral woman marries a professor only to discover she needs more than intellect. A teacher takes her poor students’ lives into her own hands. A high-achiever questions her values. A newspaper editor confronts her biases. A white writer faces the disdain of a black critic. At court for a minor offense, a righteous woman considers her real crimes. A sculptor struggles to mold her newborn. An empty nester chooses a new path. In Paris to please her mother, a docile woman discovers a different destiny. 

What is my book about?

From the very first draft, A Soldier and a Liar has always been about its complicated, flawed characters, their secrets and rocky relationships, and their journey in learning how to trust others even when they’ve spent their whole lives being hurt. There are superpowers and impending war set in a dystopian world, life-or-death battles, betrayals on every level, and questions of fault and responsibility. But at the end of the day, this is a book about love in every form—even when it’s difficult to move on from past scars inflicted by loved ones.

What is my book about?

Luggage by Kroger is my memoir of a year when, as a Houston newspaper reporter, I survived a true-life Fatal Attraction adventure that culminated with my attempted murder in 1980 at the hands of a notorious female attorney. Twice optioned for movies, this story made me the poster boy for true-life Fatal Attraction appearances on Oprah, Regis, 48 Hours, and other television programs. Since its publication in 2008, Luggage by Kroger has been a fixture on the Kindle Store’s lists of bestselling true crime and criminology titles, attracting rave reviews and winning five national book awards.

What is my book about?

It is now widely recognized that Twelve-Step spirituality, originally developed by alcoholics for alcoholics, offers all of us neurotic, tormented controllers a pathway out of our addictions. This book of essays will help you understand why and how they are able to do this. Some of the essays are intensely personal, some academically flavored. Each of them brings an appreciative philosophical eye to the Twelve Steps and helps to illuminate their logic and transformative power. The essays explore many of the key themes on which the Twelve Steps focus, including powerlessness, freedom, vulnerability, the meaning of a “higher power,” gratitude, and fellowship. While they approach the Twelve Steps from many different philosophical perspectives—existentialism, Confucianism, Buddhism, atheism, pragmatism—the contributors to the book agree that the Steps provide invaluable insights into the spiritual infrastructure of all religious and spiritual traditions.

What is my book about?

A ‘sucio’ goes to an underground clinic for therapy to end his machista ways and is accidentally transitioned. Ex-gangbangers gone straight deal with a troubled, gifted son drawn to the gangsta lifestyle promoted by an emerging music called hip hop. Dead and stuck “between somewhere and nowhere,” Roberto Clemente, the great Puerto Rican baseball icon, soon confronts the reason for his predicament. These are a few of the characters in J.L. Torres’s second story collection, Migrations, the inaugural winner of the Tomás Rivera Book Prize.

These stories take us inside the lives of Diasporicans, Puerto Ricans in the diaspora: self-exiles, unhomed, and unhinged people, estranged from loved ones, family, culture, and collective history. Despite the effects of colonization of the body and mind, Puerto Ricans have survived beyond geography and form an integral part of the American mosaic.

What is my book about?

From before its earliest settlement to the vibrant metropolis that exists today, the island of Manhattan has always been a place of struggle, growth, and transformation. Through dazzling maps and informative sidebars, Manhattan: Mapping the Story of an Island explores how humans, history, and natural events have shaped this tiny sliver of land for more than 400 years. Discover how a small rodent began an era of rapid change for the island. Learn about the people who built New York City, and how a street plan projected the city’s future. Marvel at how epic fires and storms led to major feats of engineering above and below ground. From The Battery downtown up to Inwood, every inch of the island has a story to tell.

What is my book about?

A professor’s murder reveals his discovery of a lost Dead Sea Scroll, whose text encodes the secret hiding places of the lost Second Temple Treasures. Israeli intelligence agent Maya Rimon races against time to stop a religious extremist from launching a terrorist attack at the next Blood Moon, triggering the Apocalypse. The story centers around a genuine historical artifact, the Copper Scroll, whose secrets still remain undeciphered by contemporary scholars and treasure hunters. 

Laced with clever spycraft, encrypted electronic files, mysterious ancient puzzles, plastique explosives, car chases, and Sherlockian ratiocination, The Deadly Scrolls explores the timely theme of fanaticism: among Christian millennialists, Jewish messianists, Islamic terrorists, Israeli politicians, Orthodox Jews, conspiracy theorists, devout Zionists—and spies. In other words, it’s a Jewish Da Vinci Code!

What is my book about?

An American Cakewalk is about a group of American jazz musicians, poets, writers, philosophers, and yes, cakewalkers, who didn’t crash head on into the borders of racism, poetic tradition, received ideas and economic orthodoxy that surrounded them, but, like the enslaved men and women who watched their masters’ pompous cotillion, glanced off them through satire and sly subversion. I write about Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane, Scott Joplin and Charles Mingus, Jelly Roll Morton and William and Henry James, Thorstein Veblen and Abraham Cahan – and squeeze in some others too.