Hall of Fame disc jockey Tom Joyner uses his signature brand of humor to discuss everything from business to careers to relationships as he shares the insights and lessons he's learned along the way.Now the host of a radio show that is the most popular media outlet ever among African Americans, Joyner started his career at a small AM radio station in his home state of Alabama, working his way across the midwest, and eventually landing in Chicago.In 1985, he made headlines as "The H...

The star of Orange is the New Black and Jane the Virgin presents her personal story of the real plight of undocumented immigrants in this country—updated for 2018.Diane Guerrero was just fourteen years old on the day her parents and brother were arrested and deported while she was at school. Born in the U.S., Guerrero was able to remain in the country and continue her education, depending on the kindness of family friends who took her in and helpe...

Staceyann Chin has appeared on television and radio discussing issues of race and sexuality, but it is her extraordinary voice that launched her career as a performer, poet, and activist—here, she shares her unforgettable story of triumph against all odds in this brave and fiercely candid memoir.No one knew Staceyann's mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother's house in Lottery, Jamaica on Christmas Day. Staceyann'...

Please Enjoy Your Happiness is a beautifully written coming-of-age memoir based on the English author's summer-long love affair with a remarkable older Japanese woman. Whilst serving as a seaman at the age of nineteen, Paul Brinkley-Rogers met Kaji Yukiko, a sophisticated, highly intellectual Japanese woman, who was on the run from her vicious gangster boyfriend, a member of Japan's brutal crime syndicate the yakuza.Trying to create a perfect experience of purity, she took...

As a child, Anthony Sampson was haunted by a family skeleton. He knew his grandfather John Sampson had been an authority on the gypsies. They had called him the Rai - the Master - and had flocked to his magnificent funeral on a Welsh mountain. But of his grandfather's private life he was told nothing, nor of the mysterious aunt who joined the family after his death. In fact only sixty years later did the truth begin to emerge. This book follows a trail of clues to uncover an extraordinary ...

Millions of viewers of Tony Brown's Journal, the longest-running series on PBS, know Tony Brown as an advocate for self-reliance and self-enrichment. Now, in his most personal book yet, he introduces us to the woman who brought him up and taught him the seven core values he lives by to this day: reality, knowledge, race, history, truth, patience, and love. What Mama Taught Me states that only by understanding one's place in the world can one become free in mind and spirit...

Clark Blaise's Selected Essays brings together another aspect of his tremendous and courageous oeuvre: belle lettres, essays and occasional pieces which range over autobiography, his French-Canadan heritage, the craft of fiction, American fiction, Australian fiction, and the work of such individual writers and Jack Kerouac, V.S. Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, and Bernard Malamud, his friend and mentor.

A young African American millennial filmmaker’s funny, sometimes painful, true-life coming-of-age story of trying to make it in New York City—a chronicle of poverty and wealth, creativity and commerce, struggle and insecurity, and the economic and cultural forces intertwined with "the serious, life-threatening process" of gentrification.Making Rent in Bed-Stuy explores the history and sociocultural importance of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn’s largest historically black community, t...

Gwendolyn Calvert Baker has had an extraordinary career and has witnessed a dramatic change in the ways that U.S. schools provide education to and about our multiethnic, multicultural society. But Baker hasn’t just lived through the progression of multicultural considerations—she has been singularly instrumental in the creation and acceptance of multicultural education. In Hot Fudge Sundae in a White Paper Cup, she shares her memories and experience of a lifetime spent serving and...

The profound economic and social changes in the post-Civil War United States created new challenges to a nation founded on Enlightenment and transcendental values, religious certainties, and rural traditions. Newly-freed African Americans, emboldened women, intellectuals and artists, and a polyglot tide of immigrants found themselves in a restless new world of railroads, factories, and skyscrapers where old assumptions were being challenged and new values had yet to be created. In An A...

Andrei Tarkovsky died in a Paris hospital in 1986, aged just 54. An internationally acclaimed icon of the film industry, the legacy Tarkovsky left for his fans included Andrei Rublev, Stalker, Nostalgia and a host of other brilliant works. In the Soviet Union, however, Tarkovsky was a persona non grata. Longing to be accepted in his homeland, Tarkovsky distanced himself from all forms of political and social engagement, yet endured one fiasco after another in his relations with the Soviet ...

On Election Day in 1960, a classmate of Stephanie Stokes Oliver threatened to beat her up. Why? Because in their class's mock presidential election, Stephanie revealed that she would follow her father's lead and vote for Nixon over Kennedy. Stephanie realized this day that her family was different from most other African Americans at the time: They were Republicans.Song for My Father is Stokes Oliver's memoir of her father, Charles M. Stokes, a prominent member of the Nati...