Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Cultural & Regional

Carla Funk grew up in a place of logging trucks and God, pellet guns and parables. Every Sunday, she sat with her mother and brother in the same pew at the Mennonite church while her dad stayed home with his cigarettes and a fridge full of whiskey. In these tender, humorous stories, Funk stitches together the wondrous and the mundane: making snow angels and carrying sacks of potatoes, tossing pig bladders like footballs, and vying for the Christmas pageant spotlight.

The war cost her everything: a mother, a father, and a country. Four-year-old Bang Sun, found tied to a tree, is riddled with disease, malnutrition, and bears the scars of a tragic life. Facing a future of nothing but pain, loss, and hopelessness, we follow the story of a mixed-race African American child of the Korean War. When Korea begins purging itself of its unwanted casualties, babies of war, her abandonment leads to two orphanages and eventually to adoption in America - where Bang Sun must now become an American - a Black American. 

In the fall of 2015, Steven Heighton made an overnight decision to travel to the front lines of the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and enlist as a volunteer. He arrived on the isle of Lesvos with a duffel bag and a dubious grasp of Greek, his mother's native tongue, and worked on the landing beaches and in OXY - a jerrybuilt, ad hoc transit camp providing simple meals, dry clothes, and a brief rest to refugees after their crossing from Turkey. Reaching Mithymna is a firsthand account of the crisis and an engaged exploration of the borders that divide us and the ties that bind.

Designer, activist, and educator Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller is legendary for her decades of scholarship and advocacy, and as a touchstone and conscience for the design profession. In HERE: Where the Black Designers Are, Holmes-Miller documents the history of—and answers to—the question she has been asking for decades: “Where are the Black designers?” Holmes-Miller explores this essential question through the lens of her own development as a designer and leader, beginning with her own family and its rich multiethnic history.

Growing up in Seale, Alabama as a Black Queer kid, then attending the Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate, Jon Key hungered to see himself in the fields of Art and Design. But in lectures, critiques, and in the books he read, he struggled to see and learn about people who intersected with his identity or who GOT him. So he started asking himself questions: What did it mean to be a graphic designer with his point of view? What did it mean to be a Black graphic designer?

Derrick Bell is perhaps best known for the principled stand he took at Harvard in 1990 when he quit his tenured position on the law-school faculty to protest the school's failure to grant tenure to a black woman. Now a visiting professor at New York Law School, Bell is still deeply interested in...

As a child, Shannon Luders-Manuel felt like an outsider in every environment she entered. Born to a Black father and white mother who separated when she was three, Luders-Manuel grew up with her white extended family, in largely white areas of California. Throughout her life, she yearned to understand her charismatic, transient father—whose promises were rarely kept, who struggled with alcohol and violence, and whose love she desperately needed. How could she find a place among two worlds—one white and one Black—when they felt so different?

On a September night in Montreal in 1993, Curtis Pride got his first Major League hit, prompting a long, emotional standing ovation from the crowd of 45,757 fans. Profoundly deaf since birth, Pride couldn’t hear their thunderous applause. But as the cheers grew louder and more insistent, he realized he was feeling those vibrations within his chest—an undeniable acknowledgment of an extraordinary achievement. 

A military memoir by a biracial child of refugees and survivors, Roadside is about life and death, about family lost and gained, and about America, as a dream and a reality. It’s about the roads one takes to leave home and find it again.

In Walking the Tideline, Caroline Kurtz solo hikes the rugged, beautiful Oregon Coast—an expedition of isolation, adventure, joy, and grief inside the emotional wilderness of finding one's identity after the death of a loved one.

Explore the remarkable life and heartfelt verse of the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr., the first Black senior minister at Riverside Church in New York City, one of the largest multicultural congregations in the US. As the first Black senior minister at Riverside Church in New York City, James A. Forbes Jr. shattered barriers of Black leadership in mainline Christian denominations. Through his powerful sermons, Forbes brought the rich preaching styles of the African American church to white pulpits, leaving an indelible mark on the landscape of progressive Christianity.