Cultural Literature

In the bestselling tradition of Sloane Crosley's "I Was Told There'd Be Cake" and Mindy Kaling's" Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?," a collection of humorous essays on what it's like to be unabashedly awkward in a world that regards introverts as...

Chuck Todd's gripping, fly-on-the-wall account of Barack Obama's tumultuous struggle to succeed in Washington.  Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 partly because he was a Washington outsider. But if he'd come to the White House thinking he...

In 2003, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Johnson and five fellow soldiers were captured and taken as prisoners of war. Johnson, America's first black female prisoner of war, shares the story of her capture and imprisonment in Iraq and her rescue. In...

When was the last time you said everything on your mind without holding back? In this no-holds-barred discussion of America's top hot-button issues, a journalist and a cultural anthropologist express opinions that are widely held in private--but rarely...

Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Harlem in 1917. By the early 1920s, his program of African liberation and racial uplift had attracted millions of supporters, both in the United States...

In Fatherhood, beloved NBA player, poet, children’s advocate, and devoted dad Etan Thomas speaks from his heart on what matters most in his life: being there for his children. As a leading participant in President Obama’s Fatherhood...

"Six Feet Under" meets "The Wire" in a dazzling and darkly comic memoir about coming of age in a black funeral home in Baltimore. Booker had no idea that her summer job at Wylie Funeral Home would become nine years of immersion in a hidden world. "Six...

Richard Pryor was chain lightning to everything around him. He shocked the world through with human electricity. He blew all our comfortable balance to hell. And Furious Cool captures it brilliantly . . . Part memoir, part biography, part poem, part...

While teaching at an all-Black middle school in Atlanta, Levinson realized that her students individual self-improvement would not necessarily enable them to overcome their historical marginalization. In order to overcome their civic empowerment gap,...

Sampson Davis was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. He is a board certified emergency medicine physician and author of the" New York Times" bestsellers "The Pact, We Beat the Street, "and "The Bond. "He is the youngest physician to receive the...

Solomon Northup (1808-c. 1863) was a free man kidnapped and forced into slavery in 1851. The details of his life after the publication of his acclaimed memoir are unknown. Ira Berlin is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maryland,...

An unprecedented insider's look at one of cinema's landmark works and the lasting effect it still has on our culture, this oral and visual history of "Do the Right Thing"--celebrating the movie's 20th anniversary--is told entirely by those who starred in...