As a youngster growing up in the segregated South, I didn’t have access to books about Black history, culture, and experiences. Although I attended all-Black schools, the curriculum and the books in our libraries were mostly selected by an all-White school board. So, I didn’t know that much about the history of my own people. I would not begin to learn that until I attended college. When I married and had children of my own, my wife and I still had problems finding a variety of books for children and young readers for our own children to read. So, we started our own publishing company to address the need for these books.
Nic Stones’s first book is a classic. When an altercation between a retired white police officer and his best friend turns violent, Justyce, a Black teenager, is forced to examine what it means to be a Black in America.
Writing letters to the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a journal that Justyce keeps helps him come to terms with this challenging reality.
'Absolutely incredible, honest, gut-wrenching! A must-read!' Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give ' Painfully timely and deeply moving, this is the novel the next generation should be reading' Jodi Picoult 'Justyce's story is earnest, funny, achingly human, and unshakably hopeful. I am forever changed.' Becky Albertalli, author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda 'Raw and gripping' Jason Reynolds, author of Long Way Down 'A powerful, wrenching, and compulsively readable story that lays bare the history, and the present, of racism in America' John Green, author of The Fault in our Stars
--------------- Raw, captivating, and undeniably real,…
I have spent my entire academic career researching and teaching about American religious history, particularly focusing on issues of race and religion. I am the author of numerous works on this topic, including The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in American History (co-authored with Edward J. Blum), and Howard Thurman and the Disinherited: A Religious Biography. Finally, after thirty years of work, I challenged myself to write a short reader-friendly biography of King that would capture him as fully as possible, but in a brief book that would communicate to general readers the full measure of the man.
This is volume two of Dorrien’s magisterial history of the “black social gospel,” from the mid-nineteenth century to the present; as the title indicates, King is the central figure in the book, but Dorrien places him in a long tradition and shows how and why King as a young man and seminary student wrote of himself, “I am a profound advocator of the social gospel.” This is the best place to start to have a comprehensive understanding of the multitude of intellectual influences that shaped King’s thinking and action.
This magisterial follow-up to the Grawemeyer Award-winning The New Abolition explores the black social gospel's crucial second chapter
"Magnificent . . . Breaking White Supremacy interweaves histories of families and institutions, of the black church and its storied presence, of African Americans in Africa and America, of ideas like nonviolence and socialism and uplift, and of the painfully varied ability of American Christianity to produce both a Howard University (or a Martin Luther King Jr.) and the need for them."-Jonathan Tran, Christian Century
The civil rights movement was one of the most searing developments in modern American history. It abounded…
I’m a former professional poker player and the author of a trilogy of books on poker behavior (aka poker tells). I have a psychology podcast called People Who Read People. I also do some independent research and writing: my research into online deception has been featured in the NY Times and Washington Post, and other places. I’ve been interested in psychology since I was a kid, probably due to my dad’s eclectic bookshelf that included a bunch of psychology and philosophy books.
I picked a book on language to lead the pack because there is so much more practical and reliable information contained in language, compared to the often murky and highly variable area of physical behavior. If you’re new to this area, this book is a fantastic introduction to how much information can be contained in language, whether written or spoken. McClish examines language for meaning from a bunch of true crime and legal cases. (Maybe of interest: this book inspired me to write my book Verbal Poker Tells, and I interviewed McClish for my podcast.)
Statement Analysis® is the process of analyzing a persons words to see if the person is being truthful or deceptive. There are usually several ways you can phrase a statement. People will word their statement based on all their knowledge. Therefore, their statement may include information they did not intend to share. I Know You Are Lying will show you what to look for in a verbal and written statement to determine if a person is telling the truth. The Statement Analysis techniques will also show you how to obtain additional information from a statement.
These days I am a history professor and prize-winning author. But before I started my education at my local community college, I dropped out of high school to work odd jobs on farms and in factories, and spent two decades pondering the hows and whys of the gaping inequalities in our society. My books are part of that ongoing quest. They have won a number of awards, including the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award.
Martin or Malcolm? Civil Rights or Black Power? Integration or Separation? In this book, equal parts wise and smart, Joseph shows the limits of such questions. With their different styles and ways, both Martin and Malcolm fought for the common cause of equality and full citizenship. This book gets to the heart of why this cause was the defining struggle for equality of the post-World War Two decades.
Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are the two most iconic figures of the Civil Rights movement. To most Americans, Malcolm and Martin represent contrasting political ideals -- self-defense vs. non-violence, anger vs. pacifism, separatism vs. integration, the sword vs. the shield. The Civil Rights movement itself has suffered the same fate: while non-violent direct action is remembered today as an unalloyed good and an unassailable part of our democracy, the movement's combative militancy has been either vilified or erased outright. In The Sword and the Shield, acclaimed historian Peniel Joseph offers a dual biography of Malcolm and Martin…
Bringing together the best elements of Stephen King’s early stories, with a dash of Stranger Things, Christopher Farnsworth’s Reunion is the story of a group of kids who saved the world – and then grew up to pay the price for their mistakes. I loved this beautiful story, and it hit all my sweet spots.
I first read about Helen Keller when I was in 4th grade. When I took swimming, I had two classmates who were blind like Stevie Wonder because they had been born premature and placed in oxygen-enriched incubators. I became curious about what it was like to live in a dark world. I walked around my house and neighborhood with my eyes closed, learning my way around. I gave a book report to my class about Helen Keller’s autobiography, and my classmates became excited about her, too. I learned to read braille, and proofread books for the blind when I was in junior high. I also learned the deaf sign language hand positions.
Helen Keller became blind and deaf at the age of 19 months. She was just learning how to talk. Suddenly her world became dark and quiet.
This book gives a sense of what that must have been like. It dramatizes her exciting discovery that things have names, that communication is possible. The book shows how Helen sought an education and learned to support herself despite being blind and deaf.
She comforted soldiers who returned from war, suddenly blind or deaf. She showed the world that “We do not think with eyes and ears, and our capacity for thought is not measured by five senses.”
A heartwarming portrait of an unforgettable woman by the critically acclaimed author of Abe's Honest Words and Martin's Big Words.
This picture book biography is an excellent and accessible introduction for young readers to learn about one of the world’s most influential luminaries. With her signature style of prose laced with stirring quotes, Doreen Rappaport brings to life Helen Keller’s poignant narrative. Acclaimed illustrator Matt Tavares beautifully captures the dynamism and verve of Helen Keller’s life and legacy, making Helen's Big World an unforgettable portrait of a woman whose vision for innovation and progress changed America—and the world—forever.
I’m a lifelong sci-fi/fantasy reader who loves the way speculative fiction helps us explore who we are, what we could become, and how to troubleshoot the future before we get there. As a parent and active community member, I’m looking for fresh perspectives on how to tackle the increasingly complex challenges of our time, perspectives that go beyond simplistic solutions like finding bad guys and killing them in climactic battles. I hope books that showcase nonviolent social change in all its complexity can help us imagine better ways to make a difference in our own lives.
Another nonfiction book, Healing Resistancedoes a splendid job showing the philosophical connections between nonviolence on an interpersonal level and nonviolent social change movements. Drawing on the tradition of Kingian nonviolence, this book is a useful starting place for anyone who wants to understand what nonviolence is and isn’t as well as how it works. It’s also chock full of recommendations for other books and is a great jumping-off point for further reading. Sometimes nonviolence doesn’t look like what we expect.
An expert in the field offers a mindfulness-based approach to nonviolent action, demonstrating how nonviolence is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation
Nonviolence was once considered the highest form of activism and radical change. And yet its basic truth, its restorative power, has been forgotten. In Healing Resistance, leading trainer Kazu Haga blazingly reclaims the energy and assertiveness of nonviolent practice and shows that a principled approach to nonviolence is the way to transform not only unjust systems but broken relationships.
With over 20 years of experience practicing and teaching Kingian Nonviolence, Haga offers us a practical approach…
I spent most of my life in the western United States. Born and raised in northern Idaho, a professorial position attracted me to Tucson, Arizona, the long-time home of Edward Abbey. Cactus Ed said it best: “The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders. Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction.” Upon reading books by Abbey and others writing about the American West, I became a defender of the idea of wilderness.
Guthie’s autobiography describes the wild, western United States from his perspective as a 64-year-old westerner. Born in 1901, Guthrie provides a compelling account of the rugged beauty of the West. Guthrie’s writing is lucid and compelling. I had read most of his books by the time I turned 30.
"It was a fine country to grow up in. To find riches, a boy had only to go outside," writes A. B. Guthrie, Jr., aobut his childhood in Montana early in the twentieth century. This autobiography was originally published in 1965 when he was sixty-four and still had miles to go. It recounts lively adventures and reflects on a career that brought fame for The Big Sky (1947) and led to the Pulitzer Prize for The Way West (1949).
In an afterword David Petersen, who edited Big Sky, Fair Land: The Environmental Essays of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1988), describes…
Ian Zack is a New York-based journalist who has written two critically acclaimed biographies. The subjects of both his books—Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis and Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest—began their lives in the Jim Crow South before venturing North and making their voices heard.
Before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, there was Thurgood Marshall. As a young lawyer and head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, Marshall spearheaded the civil rights organization’s slow but steady legal course in challenging and defeating segregation in the courts. Risking his life to represent black plaintiffs in the South and slowly building the legal precedents that led to Brown vs. Board of Education, Marshall had a profound effect on the course of history. This excellent biography takes you there.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • The definitive biography of the great lawyer and Supreme Court justice, from the bestselling author of Eyes on the Prize
“Magisterial . . . in Williams’ richly detailed portrait, Marshall emerges as a born rebel.”—Jack E. White, Time
Thurgood Marshall was the twentieth century’s great architect of American race relations. His victory in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the landmark Supreme Court case outlawing school segregation in the United States, would have made him a historic figure even if he had never been appointed as the first African-American to serve on…
As a journalist who learned his craft on the job in the tumultuous 1960s, I happened to find myself living in states where racial history was being written. Reporting that story required me to understand why discrimination, poverty, and violence remained so deeply rooted in modern America. I wrote Ten Ways to Fight Hate, I made a movie about civil rights martyrs, and, after seeing people from around the world making a pilgrimage to the sites of the civil rights struggle, published my guidebook. Over the course of a 50-year career, I have written a million words. I am proudest of those that tried to right wrongs, and sometimes did.
As I drove through the South researching my guidebook to civil rights sites, my back seat was filled with books. Atop the pile was Taylor Branch’s magisterial three-volume history – America in the King Years 1954-1968: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge.
Though encyclopedic, Branch’s story-telling is riveting—weaving together personalities, legalities, strategies, and geography in a way that made me feel as if I were there witnessing history as it was made. Taylor’s detail, reflecting a journalist’s quest for who, what, where, when, how, and why, showed me that these stories could best be told, understood, and felt where they happened.
In Parting the Waters, the first volume of his essential America in the King Years series, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a “compelling…masterfully told” (The Wall Street Journal) account of Martin Luther King’s early years and rise to greatness.
Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American Civil Rights Movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.
Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of…
