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...

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...

**• Kirkus Best Books of 2015 selection for Biography •Published in celebration of Holiday’s centenary, the first biography to focus on the singer’s extraordinary musical talent**When Billie Holiday stepped into Columbia’s studios in November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the most remarkable and influential career in twentieth-century popular music. Her voice weathered countless shifts in public taste, and new reincarnations of her cont...

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 ...

Comprising the first five years worth of essays and blog posts from my German adventure, Heimat is a collection of stories, ideas, and meditations on all of the dust you kick up when you move countries, when plans and expectations go out the window. It is about relationships; with countries, with people, with ourselves. It is about the Germans, their beautiful country and being quite foreign within it. It is about having a Heimat and finding another on the other side of the world.

Here is a powerful story of a 20th century slave who rose to the rank of mayor and the young man whose life he touched. Like Tuesdays with Morrie, in which Mitch Albom gleans wisdom from his mentor, Finding the Good is the story of Fred Montgomery and his influence on Lucas Johnson, a young reporter who learns of the transforming power of faith and love.Fred Montgomery, the son of sharecroppers in west Tennessee, and boyhood friend of Alex Haley, grew up in povert...