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Celebrate Black History Month in February
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Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore
by Char Adams
Longtime NBC News reporter Char Adams writes a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements told through the lens of Black-owned bookstores, which have been centers for organizing from abolition to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter. Packed with stories of activism, espionage, violence, community, and perseverance, Black-Owned starts with the first Black-owned bookstore, which an abolitionist opened in New York in 1834, and after the bookshop's violent demise, Black book-lovers carried on its cause. In the twentieth century, civil rights and Black Power activists started a Black bookstore boom nationwide. Malcolm X gave speeches in front of the National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem--a place dubbed Speakers' Corner--and later, Black bookstores became targets of FBI agents, police, and racist vigilantes. Still, stores continued to fuel Black political movements. As Adams makes clear, in an time of increasing repression, Black bookstores are needed now more than ever. Full of vibrant characters and written with cinematic flair, Black-Owned is an enlightening story of community, resistance, and joy.
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Joy Goddess: A'Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance
by A'Lelia Bundles
Raucously immersive, a deeply researched biography of A'Lelia Walker--daughter of Madam C.J. Walker and herself a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance--written by her great-granddaughter. Dubbed the joy goddess of Harlem's 1920s by poet Langston Hughes, A'Lelia Walker was a dazzling cultural icon whose legendary parties and Dark Tower salon helped define the Harlem cultural scene. After inheriting her mother's pioneering hair care business, A'Lelia became America's first high-profile Black heiress and a patron of the arts. Joy Goddess takes readers inside her New York homes, where she hosted luminaries including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, James Weldon Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, and W.E.B. Du Bois--figures who shaped African American history and culture during the Roaring Twenties. Drawing on extensive research and personal correspondence, A'Lelia Bundles presents a nuanced biography of a woman navigating life as a wife, mother, businesswoman, and patron outside the shadow of her famous mother's legacy.
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Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025
by Jelani Cobb
From the moment that Trayvon Martin's senseless murder initiated the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, America has been convulsed by new social movements--around guns, gender violence, sexual harrassment, race, policing, and on and on--and an equally powerful backlash that abetted the rise of the MAGA movement. In this punchy, powerful collection of dispatches, mostly published in The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb pulls the signal from the noise of this chaotic era. Cobb's work as a reporter takes readers to the front lines of sometimes violent conflict, and he uses his gifts as a critic and historian to crack open the meaning of it all. Through a stunning mélange of narrative journalism, criticism, and penetrating profiles, Cobb's writing captures the crises, characters, movements, and art of an era--and helps readers understand what might be coming next. Cobb has added new material to this collection--retrospective pieces that bring these stories up-to-date and tie them together, shaping these powerful short dispatches into a cohesive, epic narrative of one of the most consequential periods in recent American history.
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The Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers
by Cheryl McKissack Daniel
The riveting story of the McKissack family--the founders of the leading Black design and construction firm in the United States, from its beginnings in the mid-1800s to its thriving status today--in a moving celebration of resilience and innovation. Captured in his native West Africa and enslaved on American shores by a North Carolina plantation owner, Moses McKissack I began to build his way to emancipation right from the start. Becoming an enslaved craftsman, he picked up the trade his family would become famous for in the earliest years of the 19th century, passing his learnings down to his children and seeing them off to freedom after the Civil War. The family would settle in Tennessee, getting its bearings in the building trades despite rampant discrimination, establishing a foothold that now sees its latest generations working at the absolute peak of its industry. The family's journey underscores the importance of perseverance, innovation, and strategic vision in shaping a legacy that continues to inspire and impact the construction industry.
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A Dream Deferred: Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power
by Abby Phillip
Focusing on his presidential runs in 1984 and, especially, 1988, Phillip highlights how Jackson built an unlikely coalition that showed how Black political power could be consolidated. His experience working under Martin Luther King; his organizing the SLCC's Operation Breadbasket in Chicago and beyond; and his roots in the deep South combined into two ... impactful presidential campaigns. Appealing to the working people of urban enclaves like that of Chicago, young people on college campuses, and Black people across the South, he created the modern Democratic coalition--one that has been used by all major Democrats seeking national success from Obama to Biden to Harris.
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The Fight of His Life: Joe Louis's Battle for Freedom During World War II
by Randy Roberts
The boxing champion whose fight against the Nazis in and out of the ring made him a global icon. During the 1930s and 1940s, no African American athlete commanded the spotlight more than heavyweight boxer Joe Louis. His 1938 knockout victory over German Max Schmeling struck an early blow against Nazi Germany. But it was Louis's service in the looming war that transformed him from a patriotic role model into history's first prominent Black athlete turned activist. Already world-famous at the outset of World War II, Louis enlisted in the army, serving as a goodwill ambassador and promoting unity across military bases that crackled with racial tension. Yet Louis's experience with segregation in the army sparked his political awakening. As the war dragged on, he advocated for Black soldiers facing discrimination. Once the war ended, he joined veterans and civil rights activists to fight for voting rights and racial equality. Expertly revising the life story of one of America's most iconic Black athletes, Smith and Roberts's biography celebrates Joe Louis's forgotten fight against fascism abroad and racism at home.
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The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems
by Patricia Smith
Gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith's decorated career. Here, Smith's poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry--all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows--and of Smith's necessary voice.
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Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement
by Elaine Weiss
In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them. Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights--and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists--many of them women--trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, Mother of the Movement.
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Homeschooled: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Memoir
by Stefan Merrill Block
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were 'stifling his creativity.' Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family's living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother's erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen. Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother's increasingly eccentric theories and projects. After five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.
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The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan
by Lyse Doucet
The story of a hotel. The story of a nation. When the Inter-Continental Kabul opened in 1969, Afghanistan's first luxury hotel symbolised a dream of a modernising country connected to the world. More than fifty years on, the Inter-Continental is still standing. It has endured Soviet occupation, multiple coups, a grievous civil war, a US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban. History lives within its scarred windows and walls. Lyse Doucet, the BBC's Chief International Correspondent, has been checking into the Inter-Continental since 1988. And here, she uses its story to craft a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan. It is the story of a hotel but also the story of a people.
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The Stolen Crown: Treachery, Deceit, and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty
by Tracy Borman
In the long and dramatic annals of British history, no transition from one monarch to another has been as fraught and consequential as that which ended the Tudor dynasty and launched the Stuart in March 1603. As acclaimed Tudor historian Tracy Borman reveals in that according to Elizabeth's earliest biographer, William Camden, in his history of her reign, on her deathbed the queen indicated James was her chosen heir, and indeed he did become king soon after she died. That endorsement has been accepted as fact for more than four centuries. However, recent analysis of Camden's original manuscript shows key passages were pasted over and rewritten to burnish James' legacy. The newly-uncovered pages make clear not only that Elizabeth's naming of James never happened, but that James, uncertain he would ever gain the British throne, was even suspected of sending an assassin to London to kill the queen. Not only did James upend Elizabeth's glittering court, but the illegitimacy of his claim to the throne, which Camden suppressed, found full expression in the catastrophic reign of James' son and successor, Charles I. His execution in 1649 shocked the world and destroyed the monarchy fewer than 50 years after Elizabeth died, changing the course of British and world history.
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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: National Book Award
by Omar El Akkad
On October 25th, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: 'One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.' This tweet was viewed more than ten million times. [This book] chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, [and] Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.
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The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
by Walter Isaacson
To celebrate America's 250th anniversary, Walter Isaacson takes readers on a ... deep dive into the creation of one of history's most powerful sentences: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.' Drafted by Thomas Jefferson and edited by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, this line lays the foundation for the American Dream and defines the common ground we share as a nation. Isaacson unpacks its genius, word by word, illuminating the then-radical concepts behind it.
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Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life
by Paul Leonardi
This book examines the effects of digital technology on attention, productivity, and emotional well-being, offering practical strategies for healthier technology use. Drawing on research in communication and organizational behavior, Paul Leonardi presents methods to reduce digital fatigue while remaining engaged in professional and personal life. The author discusses habits, tools, and decision-making practices that promote balance and more intentional interaction with devices.
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Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster
by Jacob Soboroff
On the morning of January 7, 2025, a message pinged the phone of Jacob Soboroff, a national reporter for MS NOW. Big Palisades fire. We are evacuating, his brother texted within minutes of the blaze engulfing the hillside behind the home where he and his pregnant wife were living. Really bad. An attached photo showed a huge black plume rising from behind the house, an umbrella of smoke towering over everything they owned. Jacob rushed to the office of the bureau chief. Soon he was on the front line of the blaze--his first live report of what would turn out to be weeks covering unimaginable destruction. But no story Soboroff has covered at home or abroad--the trauma of family separation at the border, the displacement of the war in Ukraine, the collapse of order in Haiti--could have prepared him for reporting live as the hallmarks of his childhood were engulfed in flames around him while his hometown burned to the ground. But for Soboroff, questions remained after the fires were controlled: what had he just witnessed? How could it have happened? Is it inevitable something like it will happen again? It is a love letter to Los Angeles, a yearning to understand the fires, and why America's new age of disaster we are living through portends that--without a reckoning of how Los Angeles burned--there is more yet, and worse, to come.
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