Showing titles in Cultural & Regional

When Shane McCrae was eighteen months old, he was removed from his parents and taken to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, believing they were doing what was best for him. His grandmother loved Shane but hated people who looked like him. His grandfather policed any perceived signs of Blackness his grandson showed. In their house, Blackness would always be the worst thing about him.

This stirring memoir traverses Africa and Australia following the Speer-Jordan family, who fled persecution and poverty in Varniai, Lithuania, to South Africa. The political machinations they witnessed in that time in South Africa changed the women forever in this unusual family.

In the spring of 1980, the British colony of Rhodesia became the independent nation of Zimbabwe. Tonderai Munyevu, a born-free, was part of the hopeful next generation from a new country with a new leader, Robert Gabriel Mugabe. While exploring Tonderai’s personal story and his relationship with his father, Mugabe, My Dad and Me charts the rise and fall of one of the most controversial politicians of the 20th century.

Frank Sayi grew up in the 1970s in Mawabeni, a native reserve in colonial Rhodesia, a country under white minority rule, governed by Ian Smith's illegal regime. Reserves were places of repression and containment. There seemed to Frank to be no difference between government soldiers, police officers, and guerillas fighting for freedom. They were all violent men who terrorised the civilian population. Schools were closed, food supply chains and clothing were contaminated with poison, refugees fled the armies.

At 35, Leslie Buck made an impulsive decision to put her personal life on hold to pursue her passion. Leaving behind a full life of friends, love, and professional security, she became the first American woman to learn pruning from one of the most storied landscaping companies in Kyoto. Cutting Back recounts Buck's bold journey and the revelations she has along the way.

In the Technicolor glow of the early 70s, Jessica B. Harris debated, celebrated, and danced her way from the jazz clubs of the Manhattan's West Side to the restaurants of the Village, living out her buoyant youth alongside the great minds of the day - luminaries like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. My Soul Looks Back is her paean to that fascinating social circle and the depth of their shared commitment to activism, intellectual engagement, and each other.

When Ye Pei dreamed of Venice as a girl, she imagined a magical floating city of canals and gondola rides. And she imagined her mother, successful in her new life and eager to embrace the daughter she had never forgotten. But when Ye Pei arrives in Italy, she learns her mother works on a farm far from the city. Her only connection, a mean-spirited Chinese auntie, puts Ye Pei to work in a small-town café. Rather than giving up and returning to China, a determined Ye Pei takes on a grueling schedule.

Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina - a place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else" - has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, listeners meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be "the rare bird, the oddity".

When World War II began, seventeen-year-old Letty from a rigid Orthodox Jewish family in Belgium is trapped in a resort nestled in the French Pyrenees with her mother and two sisters. Her oldest sister disowns the family to save herself as her mother’s distress turns into violent panic attacks. Ahead of Letty lay razzias, the French police round-ups of Jews, Nazi aircraft, young love, and uncertainty about who to trust or where to go in a country hell-bent on capturing her. Now her family’s fate, whether triumph or catastrophe, hinges on Letty’s escape plan.

The daughter of a prominent Palestinian father and a sophisticated Lebanese mother, Najla Said grew up in New York City, confused and conflicted about her cultural background and identity. Said knew that her parents identified deeply with their homelands, but growing up in a Manhattan world that was defined largely by class and conformity, she felt unsure about who she was supposed to be, and was often in denial of the differences she sensed between her family and those around her.

When American Claire Craig Evans married a charming British man, there was a cost for the snappy banter and countless offers of tea: she had to uproot life as she knew it and relocate to the UK. Who wouldn’t want to move to an enchanted island where mysterious women with dewy complexions made jam in thatched cottages with millennia-old lichen attached?

ದೇಶ ಕಾಯುವುದು ಅತ್ಯಂತ ಹೆಮ್ಮೆಯ ಮತ್ತು ಜೀವಪಣಕ್ಕಿಟ್ಟು ಹೋರಾಡುವ ಕಾಯಕ.‌ ಇಂದು ಲೇಹ್-ಲಡಾಕ್ ಭಾರತದಲ್ಲೇ ಉಳಿದುಕೊಂಡಿದ್ದರೆ ಅದಕ್ಕೆ ಕಾರಣನಾದ ಲಡಾಕಿ ಯುವಕ ಚೆವಾಂಗ್ ರಿಂಚೆನ್ ನ್ನು ಮರೆಯುವ ಹಾಗಿಲ್ಲ.

Every so often, a story comes along that is so compelling, so inspiring, and so hard to believe that it must be written down and shared with the world. Steeve Simbert’s journey from abject poverty to living the American Dream is one such story. It will educate you, inspire you, and at times entertain you; but make no mistake, it is also a story of abuse, poverty, deception, and pain. This gripping and personal account of Steeve’s arduous journey from the pits of hell to the glorious heights of success begins in Miami, where he and his twin are expelled from their father’s house.

Cinelle Barnes was barely three years old when her family moved into Mansion Royale, a stately ten-bedroom home in the Philippines. Filled with her mother’s opulent social aspirations and the gloriously excessive evidence of her father’s self-made success, it was a girl’s storybook playland. But when a monsoon hits, her father leaves, and her mother’s terrible lover takes the reins, Cinelle’s fantastical childhood turns toward tyranny she could never have imagined.

A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was 10 years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over the next century her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood and the death of children.

First published in 1997,

Little X chronicles the multigenerational experience of Tate's family, who broke from the traditional Black church in the 1950s to join the radical Nation of Islam, then struggled to remain intact through disillusionment, shifting loyalties, and forays into Orthodox Islam.

Little X offers a rare glimpse into the everyday experience of the Nation of Islam and into a little-understood part of America's history and heritage.

Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the most inspirational figures in American history. From his march on Washington to his time in a Birmingham jail, King's life and work continue to have a profound effect on our nation. The Everything Martin Luther King Jr. Book explores King's life, times, and influence.

Part memoir and part how-not-to guide, The Wrong End of the Table is everything you wanted to know about Arabs but were afraid to ask, with chapters such as “Tattoos and Other National Security Risks,” “You Can’t Blame Everything on Your Period; Sometimes You’re Going to Be a Crazy Bitch: and Other Advice from Mom,” and even an open letter to Trump. This is the story of every American outsider on a path to find themselves in a country of beautiful diversity.

When Huda meets Hadi, the boy she will ultimately marry, she is six years old. Both are the American-born children of Iraqi immigrants, who grew up on opposite ends of California. Hadi considers Huda his childhood sweetheart, the first and only girl he's ever loved, but Huda needs proof that she is more than just the girl Hadi's mother has chosen for her son. She wants what the American girls have - the entertainment culture's almost singular tale of chance meetings, defying the odds, and falling in love.

The story follows an immigrant girl who navigates a difficult childhood marked by trauma and pain while moving between various cities. Throughout her 46 years, she makes her share of mistakes but ultimately learns and grows from them. After a long journey, she finally meets her soulmate, and they experience an immediate, profound connection. Their shared histories of pain and trauma draw them together, creating a bond that feels timeless. Despite having crossed paths in 2005, it wasn't until later that their souls truly connected.