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Becoming by Michelle Obama
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African-American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare. In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman
The instant #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, the luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
Also available in print: PS3607.O59774 A6 2021
Civil Rights Chronicle: Letters from the South by Clarice T. Campbell
A California teacher named Clarice T. Campbell wrote detailed letters to family and friends about her "small adventure" while studying at the universities of Alabama and Mississippi and teaching at black Mississippi and South Carolina colleges from 1956 until 1965. Participant and observer, she challenged segregated bus stations, restaurants, churches, and mindsets. Along the way she met intolerant and admirable people, both famous and local. Anyone who says nothing has changed must have forgotten or never have known the daily indignities, not to mention the powerless position, of African-Americans in the South before the 1960s. Motivated to educate or remind, Campbell has collected and edited the amazing letters she wrote. They document a time and a place, as well as her observant, feeling nature. Those who have read them have noted her "astute observation of race relations" and her "lighter vein that entertains while it teaches." During her residence in the South, she encountered racial injustice everywhere. As she proceeded with her daily activities-shopping, having her car repaired, dining in cafes and restaurants-she recognized matters that she deemed "wrong." But only she and a few others dared to speak out. With her clear insight into a closed society being broken open, her collective letters to the world outside are a chronicle of the Deep South's struggle and America's quest for civil rights. Civil Rights Chronicle: Letters from the South is a storybook, an autobiography, and, for the reader seeking an eyewitness's keen documentation, a history of troubled times. Clarice T. Campbell retired from teaching in 1988. She lives in Tupelo, Mississippi.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
The Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth
From slavery to liberation to life as an abolitionist, feminist, orator, and preacher--the autobiography of a woman who refused to be anything but free. Born into slavery in New York around 1797, then sold from master to master, Sojourner Truth spent her formative years witnessing the cruelty inherent in the institution of slavery. Escaping to a friendly household before emancipation, she learned that her young son had been sold illegally and launched a lawsuit that would end with his release--the first time in America that a black woman went to court against a white man and won. But Truth hadn't even begun her work. She made it her life's mission to free all those who were considered less than equal--both those in chains and those held down because of their gender--ultimately inspiring her friends and followers with the legendary speech that came to be known as "Ain't I a Woman?" So great was Truth's renown and respect that she met with President Abraham Lincoln in 1864. She was later named one of the 100 Most Significant Americans of All Time by Smithsonian magazine. Published in 1850, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth was spoken aloud to Truth's friend and neighbor Olive Gilbert, as she herself was illiterate. Along with The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, it remains one of the most moving and eloquent slave narratives--a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
A New York Times Notable Book: In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future. "A stunner." --Flea, musician and actor, TheWall Street Journal Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren's father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others. When fire destroys their compound, Lauren's family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author's estate.
The Poems of Phillis Wheatley: With Letters and a Memoir by Phillis Wheatley
Born in Africa in 1753, Phillis Wheatley was kidnapped at the age of seven and sold into slavery. At nineteen, she became the first black American poet to publish a book, Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral, on which this volume is based. Wheatley's poetry created a sensation throughout the English-speaking world, and the young poet read her work in aristocratic drawing rooms on both sides of the Atlantic. The London Chronicle went so far as to declare her "perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted genius that the world ever produced." Wheatley's elegies and odes offer fascinating glimpses into the origins of African-American literary traditions. Most of the poems express the effects of her religious and classical New England education, consisting of elegies for the departed and odes to Christian salvation. This edition of Wheatley's historic works includes letters and a biographical note written by one of the poet's descendants. Includes a selection from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "On Being Brought from Africa to America."
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
"A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." --Zadie Smith One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years--due largely to initial audiences' rejection of its strong black female protagonist--Hurston's classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
The Truths We Hold by Kamala Harris
A New York Times bestseller From Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris, one of America's most inspiring political leaders, a book about the core truths that unite us, and the long struggle to discern what those truths are and how best to act upon them, in her own life and across the life of our country Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris's commitment to speaking truth is informed by her upbringing. The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents--an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India--met as activists in the civil rights movement when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and when she became a prosecutor out of law school, a deputy district attorney, she quickly established herself as one of the most innovative change agents in American law enforcement. She progressed rapidly to become the elected District Attorney for San Francisco, and then the chief law enforcement officer of the state of California as a whole. Known for bringing a voice to the voiceless, she took on the big banks during the foreclosure crisis, winning a historic settlement for California's working families. Her hallmarks were applying a holistic, data-driven approach to many of California's thorniest issues, always eschewing stale "tough on crime" rhetoric as presenting a series of false choices. Neither "tough" nor "soft" but smart on crime became her mantra. Being smart means learning the truths that can make us better as a community, and supporting those truths with all our might. That has been the pole star that guided Harris to a transformational career as California's attorney general, as a United States senator, and now as vice president-elect, grappling in every role with an array of complex issues, from health care and the new economy to immigration, national security, the opioid crisis, and accelerating inequality. By reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, Kamala Harris offers in THE TRUTHS WE HOLD a master class in problem solving, in crisis management, and leadership in challenging times. Through the arc of her own life, on into the great work of our day, she communicates a vision of shared struggle, shared purpose, and shared values. In a book rich in many home truths, not least is that a relatively small number of people work very hard to convince a great many of us that we have less in common than we actually do, but it falls to us to look past them and get on with the good work of living our common truth. When we do, our shared effort will continue to sustain us and this great nation, now and in the years to come.
Also available in print: E901.1.H37 A3 2019
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an "unrecognized immigration" within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.
Also available in print: E185.6 .W685 2010
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction ANew York Times Bestseller Named a Notable Book of the Year by theNew York Times Book Review Named one of the "10 Best Books of 2019" by theNew York Times Book Review,Seattle Times, Chicago Public Library, theChicago Tribune, andSlate Named a Best Book of 2019 by theWashington Post, NPR'sBook Concierge, NPR's Fresh Air, theGuardian,BookPage, New York Public Library, andShelf Awareness Named a Best Memoir of the Decade byLitHub A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East. In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant--the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become IvoryMae's thirteenth and most unruly child. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom'sThe Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina.The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser-known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised,The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
Also available in print: PS3602.R6458 Z46 2019