**As seen on ABC's The View • One of W magazine’s Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2023"We reserve this space for our humanity in all of its fond, ironic, elated, grief-stricken, confused glory . . . When you find yourself alone and downtrodden, when the news is too much, return to these pages. This one is for you." —from the introduction by Cole Brown and Natalie Johnson"There's something particularly special about Black Love. When you consider the history ...

An honest and courageous examination of what it means to navigate the in-betweenCole has heard it all before—token, bougie, oreo, Blackish—the things we call the kids like him. Black kids who grow up in white spaces, living at an intersection of race and class that many doubt exists. He needed to get far away from the preppy site of his upbringing before he could make sense of it all. Through a series of personal anecdotes and interviews with his peers, Cole transp...

Matt James, the first Black bachelor on ABC’s beloved television show, The Bachelor, shares his views on the controversial topics that defined his season and confronts matters of race, opportunity, and his biracial identity head on.When The Bachelor franchise announced Matt James as the first Black lead, it was celebrated as long-overdue progress on the primetime show. America fell in love with Matt—the Christian, former NFL athlete, and nonprofit...

Born at the peak of the Civil War in 1863, James Rubin Shepard faced overwhelming tragedy and daunting personal disability in his struggle to rise above his obstacles and persevere. Even so, his intelligence and academic prowess helped him find a way through the difficulties he encountered. Divine Intervention tells the life story of James Shepard, from early childhood through his dreams of becoming a lawyer and entering politics, ambitions that were forestalled when a sudden hearing ailme...

An honest and courageous examination of what it means to navigate the in-betweenCole has heard it all before—token, bougie, oreo, Blackish—the things we call the kids like him. Black kids who grow up in white spaces, living at an intersection of race and class that many doubt exists. He needed to get far away from the preppy site of his upbringing before he could make sense of it all. Through a series of personal anecdotes and interviews with his peers, Cole transp...

Matt James, the first Black bachelor on ABC’s beloved television show, The Bachelor, shares his views on the controversial topics that defined his season and confronts matters of race, opportunity, and his biracial identity head on.When The Bachelor franchise announced Matt James as the first Black lead, it was celebrated as long-overdue progress on the primetime show. America fell in love with Matt—the Christian, former NFL athlete, and nonprofit...

Read by the author.Are you tired of people knowing who you are but no one really knowing you?As the star of the twentieth season of The Bachelor, Ben Higgins looked like he had it all together. Instead, Ben felt dissatisfied, fearful, and deeply alone. Like so many of us, he thought of himself as the kid who never got picked for the game, the person always on the outside of the joke, the friend who knew a lot of people but...

From the fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist J. Drew Lanham.Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else"—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, listeners meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the na...

A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America’s “separate but equal” doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never toldOn September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda were barred from attending middle school in Rosedale, Mississippi. The girls were Chinese American and considered by the school to be “colored”; the school was for whites....

Inspired by conversations with many veterans following the publication of her grandfather's wartime memoir, Victoria Panton-Bacon has gathered a moving collection of stories. These are stories of bravery, sadness, horror, doubt, and longing, from ordinary people who lived under the long shadows cast by World War II and whose young lives were changed irrevocably. These were the young of a different age when work for most began at fourteen, and the world conspired to thrust them into the jaw...

On August 9, 1945, on the tiny island of Tinian in the South Pacific, a twenty-five-year-old American Army Air Corps major named Charles W. Sweeney climbed aboard a B-29 Superfortress in command of his first combat mission, one devised specifically to bring a long and terrible war to a necessary conclusion . . .The last military officer to command an atomic mission, Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sweeney has the unique distinction of having been an integral part of both the Hiroshima and the...

In Betty Reid Soskin's 96 years of living, she has been a witness to a grand sweep of American history. When she was born in 1921, the lynching of African-Americans was a national disgrace, minstrel shows were the most popular American form of entertainment, women were looked at suspiciously by many for exercising their right to vote, and most African-Americans in the Deep South could not vote at all. From her great-grandmother, who had been enslaved until she was in her mid-2s, Betty hear...