Cultural Literature

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR AND PASTE MAGAZINE An intimate account of life in a West African fishing village, tugged by currents ancient and modern, and dependent on an ocean that is being radically transformed. The sea...

Es'kia Mphahlele's seminal memoir of life in apartheid South Africa--available for the first time in Penguin Classics Nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1969, Es'kia Mphahlele is considered the Dean of African Letters and the father of black South African...

In the late nineteenth century, Charles Booth's landmark social and economic survey found that 35 percent of Londoners were living in abject poverty. Booth's team of social investigators interviewed Londoners from all walks of life, recording their...

(Guitar Educational). From B.B. King and Buddy Guy to Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan, blues guitar has become a constant in the realm of American popular music. This book teaches the concepts and techniques as fostered by these legendary bluesmen: 12-bar...

"One of our true superstars of nonfiction" (David Foster Wallace), Lewis Hyde offers a playful and inspiring defense of forgetfulness by exploring the healing effect it can have on the human psyche. We live in a culture that prizes memory--how much we...

What happens to a little girl who grows up without a father? Can she ever feel truly loved and fully alive? Does she ever heal--or is she doomed to live a wounded, fragmented life and to pass her wounds down to her own children? Fatherlessness afflicts...

- Revised and expanded with recently uncovered information - Detailed maps of escape routes and networks - Eyewitness accounts of fugitives Organized in antebellum America to help slaves escape to freedom, the Underground Railroad was cloaked in secrecy...

Born into "the blessings of liberty in a free State," Solomon Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Bayou Boeuf region of Louisiana's Red River Valley. Twelve Years a Slave is the chronicle of his captivity at the mercy of sadistic...

From the Upstate to the Lowcountry, African Americans have had a gigantic impact on the Palmetto State. Unfortunately, their stories are often overshadowed.Collected here for the first time, this selection of essays by historian Damon L. Fordham brings...

What impact has two decades' worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of Muslims in Britain? The Suspect draws on the author's lived experiences of being suspected of terrorism to take the reader on a journey through British...

How community-centered, peer-to-peer, youth knowledge exchanges are evolving into a strong economic and political foundation on which to build radical public education. Following in the rich traditions in African American cooperative economic and...

"[Robinson's] lifelong triumph over adversity belongs to the greatest of American success stories." --Peter Hannaford, Washington Times In this gripping, never-before-told tale, biographer Thomas E. Simmons brings to life the true story of John C...