A major reappraisal of the life of legendary entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., Gonna Do Great Things is at once an intimate portrait and an exuberant celebration of a wholly American icon. Through his multifaceted talent and personality, Sammy became one of the most magnetic and contentious figures in modern entertainment history. His outstanding talents as a dancer, singer, actor, impressionist, and comedian, combined with his close association with megastars and his interracial marr...

Halima Bashir was born in the remote desert of Darfur, Sudan, and was raised in a loving family that was part of the black African Zaghawa tribe. In a rare privilege for a girl of her village, she attended junior and secondary school in a nearby town. Bashir proved herself academically gifted and went on to study medicine, becoming her tribe’s first qualified doctor, much to the pride of her father.But war had already broken out in Darfur when Dr. Bashir began her practice, and the...

Lawrence Hill’s remarkable novel, Any Known Blood, a multi-generational story about a Canadian man of mixed race, was met with critical acclaim and it marked the emergence of a powerful new voice in Canadian writing. Now Hill, himself a child of a black father and white mother, brings us Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, a provocative and unprecedented look at a timely and engrossing topic.In Black Berry, Sweet Juice, Hill movi...

One of "The Best Memoirs of a Generation" (Oprah's Book Club): a young woman's journey from the mango groves and barrios of Puerto Rico to Brooklyn, and eventually on to HarvardIn a childhood full of tropical beauty and domestic strife, poverty and tenderness, Esmeralda Santiago learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs, the taste of morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. But when her mother, Mami, a force of nature...

The expanded edition of the definitive, critically praised, and most beloved biography of music legend Jimi Hendrix—including previously unpublished photos.Originally published to great acclaim in 1978, ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky was written by poet, scholar, and Hendrix friend David Henderson as a personal favor to Jimi. Since then, it has garnered rave reviews and sold over 500,000 copies, reaching the legions of Hendrix fans worldwide.This m...

"A harrowing story of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster that turned Japan upside down . . . contemporary journalism and history at its finest." —Douglas Brinkley, New York Times– bestselling authorBlending history, science, and gripping storytelling, Strong in the Rain brings the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Japan in 2011 and its immediate aftermath to life through the eyes of the men and women who exp...

“In the harsh, bitter, cold environment we work in, seal harvesting and fishing are two of the most dangerous jobs in the world. The North Atlantic has no friends. It just makes you believe it is your friend when it offers up its beauty and bounty. Without notice it can turn ugly, a ravenous enemy ready to devour! It doesn’t matter if you are the greatest or the worst fishing captain in the North Atlantic: if the sea wants you, it will get you.” This is the memoir of John Gillett, a fisher...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning biography about the author and premier architect of America's civil rights movement.Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Bancroft PrizeA Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle AwardThis monumental biography by David Levering Lewis—eight years in the research and writing—treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fif...

During the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project undertook the task of locating former slaves and recording their oral histories. The more than ten thousand pages of interviews with over two thousand former slaves were filed in the Library of Congress, where they were known to scholars and historians but few others. From this storehouse of information, Belinda Hurmence has chosen twenty-seven narratives from the twelve hundred typewritten pages of interviews with 284 former South Carolina sl...

A diagnosis of cancer leads to healing and transformation in the Amazon jungle• Explains in vivid detail De Wys’s experience of being healed from cancer through visionary ayahuasca rituals in Ecuador• Describes her apprenticeship and relationship with the shaman who cured her• Explores the ways this spiritual medicine can heal the emotional origins of disease now plaguing our modern technological culture• Chosen as one of the “Top 10 Books of the New Edge” b...

At the age of eleven, the daughter of a Sicilian sharecropper, Maria Grammatico, entered the San Carlo Institute in the mountaintop town of Erice, an orphanage run by nuns who were famous throughout Sicily for their almond pastries, but who were less adept at dealing with young girls. After ten years of hard work and harsh discipline, Maria emerged with the secrets of the nuns' pastries hidden inside her head.This is the story of her carefree country childhood—her Dickensian life i...

While exiled from her beloved hometown of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Sybil Haydel Morial began to document her remarkable life. In this memoir, she focuses on the sweeping changes—desegregation, the end of Jim Crow, the fight for voting rights and political empowerment—that transformed the country during her lifetime. But this is also a personal story, an account of her own evolution as an African-American woman in the midst of tempests. By necessity and choice, Sybil, her late h...