What is the purpose of my life? What is friendship? What is faith? These universal questions, which are especially relevant to young adults, form the heart of this compelling story, told through real letters and diary entries.Anni, who grows from her teenage years to adulthood over the course of the book, is passionate about life and unsparing in her search for authenticity. Articulate and probing, her words have a contemporary ring as she plumbs t...

This National Book Award finalist is a revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann.In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her.Sorting through boxes of family papers and ...

Living in Hell is a true story providing a window into the life of a young woman growing up in Iran. It is also an educational history of Iran and its people. Although this story is entirely mine, it is also the story of too many women in the Middle East who suffer similar fates. Iranian women have come a long way since I grew up in Iran but still much needs to be done for them, as well other women of the Middle East, to become completely independent, able to make their own decisions and s...

'Brett was the sweetest, funniest, cleverest man I've ever known, my confidant and best friend. He had a rare radiance, an inner certainty which was compelling and hugely attractive.'Frannie Hopkirk knew Brett Whiteley all his life. He was her brother. Here, for the first time, one of those closest to Brett presents a vivid and movingly personal insight into his life and work.Throughout their lives, despite the sometimes vast geographical distances that sep...

"A multilayered, utterly gripping account of life among the developing world's blind population." — New York TimesRosemary Mahoney tells the story of Braille Without Borders, the first school for the blind in Tibet, and of Sabriye Tenberken, the remarkable blind woman who founded the school. Fascinated and impressed by what she learned from the blind children of Tibet, Mahoney was moved to investigate further the cultural history of blindn...

Many books have been written about the problems of racial hostility and cultural diversity-but none like Ebony and Ivory.This powerful collection offers a refreshing and humorous look at these serious issues that face our society. The fables and articles in Ebony and Ivory will make the reader laugh, cry, and shout and will also cause us to do some deep self-evaluation.

A New York Times Notable BookDaring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer's subjects: his mother, a self-described "Negress," who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, who...

Here, eagerly anticipated, is the definitive biography of Elijah Muhammad (né Elija Poole), a sharecropper's son with a fourth- grade education who became one of the most controversial Americans of the twentieth century, the founder and "Prophet" of the Nation of Islam, a movement dedicated to black separatism and self-empowerment.Though Muhammad's main argument--that white people were innately evil ("devils," he called them)--ran counter to the precepts of orthodox Islam, he was t...

This absorbing collection of letters spans a decade in the lifelong friendship of two remarkable writers who engaged the subjects of literature, race, and identity with deep clarity and passion.The correspondence begins in 1950 when Ellison is living in New York City, hard at work on his enduring masterpiece, Invisible Man, and Murray is a professor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Mirroring a jam session in which two jazz musicians "trade twelves"—each improvisin...

Ebbing Tide the fourth and final volume in the Tide series has been difficult to complete. The earlier books were a pleasure to write as I related some extremely funny and zany moments while growing up and making my career in the North Sea fishing industry. In this volume Ive continued with the humour but have also narrated the long slow death of the way of life I was born to. In 1971 the UK joined the Common Market and control of our national waters and fish stocks (but not oil) was surre...

Setouchi was eminently qualified to write this historical novel on women's liberation in Japan, which had its roots in sexual politics, socialism, and anarchism, movements in decline following the famous massacre after the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo and neighboring prefectures on September 1, 1923. Among those put to death in the frenzied and prejudicial aftermath of the quake was Noe Ito (1895 1923), the heroine of Beauty in Disarray.Was Ito a selfless ...

Lady Nijo, a ladyinwaiting of the thirteenthcentury Japanese Imperial Court, was a small child when the young exEmperor Go Fukakusa took her under his protection. She was between twelve and thirteen years old when he made her his mistress, and for more than a decade after that the lovely young girl from one of Japan's most noble families lived at the court as an honored Lady in the exEmperor's entourage.As a historical work, the book documents the routine of long-ago court lif...