|
|
|
|
I'll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month
by Jarvis R. Givens
On its one-hundredth anniversary, a powerful and essential meditation on the origins, evolution, and future of Black History Month from one of America's leading historians of Black education and the author of American Grammar.In I'll Make Me a World, acclaimed Harvard scholar Jarvis R. Givens takes us on a personal and political journey through the 100-year history of Black History Month--from its radical beginnings in 1926 as Negro History Week to its role today as a celebration and flashpoint in America's cultural battles. Drawing on archival research, personal stories involving family and students, and especially the wisdom of Black educators, Givens recovers the legacy of Carter G. Woodson and many others who envisioned Black history as a liberatory force--knowledge that shapes who we are, how we resist, and what we dream.With striking clarity, Givens challenges today's myopic commemorations of iconic figures and urges us to expand our understanding of Black history to include the everyday lives of ordinary people--the workadays whose stories have long gone untold but form critical parts of Black history. Indeed, people who played important roles in passing on Black memories that helped disrupt oppressively narrow perspectives on human life. Givens also attends to the labor involved in preserving Black history, especially in intellectual environments where it is constantly denigrated and undervalued, and he insists that more transparency about such processes is necessary to ensure this worthy tradition is passed on to future generations.I'll Make Me A World is a call to remember, reimagine, and reclaim an intellectual tradition built by communities well before our time, and to take seriously what is politically at stake in its preservation. At a time when Black history is under attack, this book offers an inspiring vision for how it can still be a source of power, truth, and possibility.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
by Belle Burden
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Burden's searing, probing memoir explores . . . what she learned about intimacy and her own spirit.--People A beautifully written instant classic. Strangers is gripping and heartbreaking and a must-read for every wife--and husband.--Graydon Carter Asks us to examine life's most perplexing questions: Can we see the invisible fault lines in a marriage or truly know the people closest to us?--Lori Gottlieb It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn't. In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha's Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together--building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume. In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was--someone nicknamed Belle the Good--gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice. With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|