"Have No Fear reminds us what it meant to live under a system where segregation was important enough to kill for and where being treated with dignity and respect was a whites-only entitlement." --The New York Times Book Review"A gutsy, American patriot and treasure . . . an important slice of American history."--Dan Rather"Charles Evers has given us one of the most extraordinary memoirs about race in America that I know. This holy sinner of the civil rights era, who kept co...

The comedian chronicles his coming of age while analyzing politics & culture in this New York Times–bestselling memoir and satirical guide.If You Don't Buy This Book, You're a Racist.Have you ever been called "too black" or "not black enough?"Have you ever befriended or worked with a black person?Have you ever heard of black people?If you answered yes to any of these questions, this book is for you.Raised by a pro...

101 chance meetings, juxtaposing the famous and the infamous, the artistic and the philistine, the pompous and the comical, the snobbish and the vulgar, each 1,001 words long, and with a time span stretching from the 19th century to the 21st.Life is made up of individuals meeting one another. They speak, or don’t speak. They get on, or don’t get on. They make agreements, which they either hold to or ignore. They laugh, they cry, they are excited, they are indifferent, they share se...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “There’s such warmth to Dumas’ writing that it invites the reader to pull up a seat at her table and smile right along with her at the quirks of her family and Iranians and Americans in general.”—BooklistIn the New York Times bestselling memoir Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas recounted her adventures growing up Iranian American in Southern California. Now she again mines her rich Persian heritage in

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book PrizeThe Arab of the Future, the #1 French best-seller, tells the unforgettable story of Riad Sattouf's childhood, spent in the shadows of 3 dictators—Muammar Gaddafi, Hafez al-Assad, and his father.In striking, virtuoso graphic style that captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervor of political idealism, Riad Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France...

"Wanna stand in the face of a charging elephant, get hit by a motorcycle, eat giant water bugs, blowtorch your mouth on some of the hottest chili peppers on earth, then go watch a sex change operation? Of course you don't, but, happily, Jerry Hopkins has done all that and more—lots more—in this darkly humorous, deeply affectionate, clear-eyed but never patronizing portrait of Thailand, his adopted home. Highly recommended." —Tim Cahill, author of Lost in My Own Backyard, Hold t...

When John F. Baker Jr. was in the seventh grade, he saw a photograph of four former slaves in his social studies textbook—two of them were his grandmother's grandparents. He began the lifelong research project that would become The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation, the fruit of more than thirty years of archival and field research and DNA testing spanning 250 years.A descendant of Wessyngton slaves, Baker has written the most accessible and exciting wo...

Completely revised and edited with an introduction and notes by Vincent CarrettaAn exciting and often terrifying adventure story, as well as an important precursor to such famous nineteenth-century slave narratives as Frederick Douglass's autobiographies, Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrativerecounts his kidnapping in Africa at the age of ten, his service as the slave of an officer in the British Navy, his ten years of labor on slave ships until he w...

From critically acclaimed journalist Valerie Boyd comes an eloquent profile of one of the most intriguing cultural figures of the twentieth century—Zora Neale Hurston.A woman of enormous talent and remarkable drive, Zora Neale Hurston published seven books, many short stories, and several articles and plays over a career that spanned more than thirty years. Today, nearly every black woman writer of significance—including Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walke...

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...

A descendant of Lebanese Catholic immigrants on her father's side and Baptist sharecroppers on her mother's, Teresa Nicholas recounts in Buryin' Daddy a southern upbringing with an unusual inflection. As the book opens, the author recalls her charmed early childhood in the late 1950s, when she and her family live with her grandparents in a graceful old bungalow in Yazoo City, Mississippi. But when the author is five, her eccentric father-secretive, penurious, autocratic, hoarding-moves his...

The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak is the story of two larger-than-life characters and the son whom their lives helped to shape. Ruth Fertel was a petite, smart, tough-as-nails blonde with a weakness for rogues, who founded the Ruth's Chris Steak House empire almost by accident. Rodney Fertel was a gold-plated, one-of-a-kind personality, a railbird-heir to wealth from a pawnshop of dubious repute just around the corner from where the teenage Louis Armstrong and his trumpet w...