Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Cultural & Regional

In the Black traces B. Denham Jolly's personal and professional struggle for a place in a country where Black Canadians have faced systematic discrimination. He arrived from Jamaica to attend university in the mid-1950s and worked as a high school teacher before going into the nursing and retirement-home business. Though he was ultimately successful in his business ventures, Jolly faced both overt and covert discrimination, which led him into social activism.

In The Barefoot Bingo Caller, Antanas Sileika finds what's funny and touching in the most unlikely places, from the bingo hall to the collapsing Soviet Union. He shares stories that span his attempts to shake off his suburban, ethnic, folk-dancing childhood to his divided allegiance as a Lithuanian-Canadian father. Antanas has a keen eye for social comedy.

Driven by his single mother's dreams for his survival and success, Kevin Powell became the first in his family to attend a university, where he became a student leader keenly aware of widespread social injustice. But the struggle to define himself and break out of poverty continued into adulthood, with traumatic periods of homelessness and despair. As a young star journalist with Vibe magazine, Powell interviewed luminaries such as Tupac Shakur, writing influential chronicles of the evolution of hip-hop from his eyewitness view.

In this revealing and beautifully written memoir, Mark Obama Ndesandjo recounts his complex relationship with his older half brother, President Barack Obama, including their first meeting in Kenya over 20 years ago. The book also offers the author's inspiring personal story about identity and multiculturalism.

To many in the age of Obama, America had succeeded in "going beyond race", putting the divisions of the past behind us. And then 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and then Baltimore blew up; and then gunfire shattered a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly the entire country awakened to a stark fact: Young Black men are an endangered species.

Después de descubrir el origen de La Nieta del Maharani, Maha Akhtar nos muestra sus emociones al saber quien fue su abuelo. También nos cuenta la relación con su madre después de muchos años de estar separadas, y como su vida ha sido impactada no solo por el carácter de su madre, sino también por la mujer que tuvo a su lado durante su adolescencia, su tía Hafsah.

A candid, savvy, inspiring, and often hilarious memoir by one of America's most fearless political leaders. Beloved by the immigrants and working people whose rights he has championed, 11-term Congressman Luis Gutierrez is, among Latinos and along with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the most recognized Hispanic public figure in America.

Born into slavery in Kentucky, raised on the Western frontier on the farm adjacent to Daniel Boone’s, “rented” out in adolescence to a succession of steamboat captains on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the young man known as “Sandy” reinvented himself as “William Wells” Brown after escaping to freedom. He lifted himself out of illiteracy and soon became an innovative, widely admired, and hugely popular speaker on antislavery circuits (both American and British) and went on to write the earliest African American works in a plethora of genres....

The name "Geronimo" came to Corine Sombrun insistently in a trance during her apprenticeship to a Mongolian shaman. That message and the need to understand its meaning brought her to the home of the legendary Apache leader's great-grandson, Harlyn Geronimo, himself a medicine man on the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico.

Junius Wilson (1908-2001) spent 76 years at a state mental hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, including 6 in the criminal ward. He had never been declared insane by a medical professional or found guilty of any criminal charge. But he was deaf and Black in the Jim Crow South. Unspeakable is the story of his life.

Reflecting the yearnings and anxieties of a generation that came of age after World War II, this is the iconic journey of a restless man who leaves the hometown he loves to discover the world, and in so doing, to find himself. My New Orleans offers a penetrating and memorable account of a fading period of America’s evolution, turbulence and possibilities, as unique as the city of Wolf’s memory.

Stacyann Chin has appeared on television and radio, including The Oprah Winfrey Show , CNN, and PBS, discussing issues of race and sexuality. But it is her extraordinary voice that launched her career as a performer, poet, and activist. Here, she shares her unforgettable story of triumph against all odds in this brave and fiercely candid memoir.

No one knew Staceyann's mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother's house in Jamaica, on Christmas Day.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Eluding the Nazis in Occupied France is an unusual memoir about the childhood and young adulthood of Sarah Lew Miller. Born in a large Orthodox Jewish family in Dereczyn, Poland, Sarah's family moved to Paris in 1937 to escape poverty.

The German Occupation of France just three years later threatened her family's existence with repressive anti-Jewish laws and massive deportations of Jews to death camps.

If you're Irish American or African American or Eastern European Jewish American, there's a rich literature to give you a sense of your family's arrival-in-America story. Until now, that hasn't been the case for Chinese Americans. From noted historian Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones uncovers the three-generational saga of the Tape family. It's a sweeping story centered on patriarch Jeu Dips' (Joseph Tapes') self-invention as an immigration broker in post-gold rush San Francisco, and the extraordinary rise it enables.

In the first full biography of actor Sidney Poitier, Aram Goudsouzian analyzes the life and career of a Hollywood legend, from his childhood in the Bahamas to his 2002 Oscar for lifetime achievement. Poitier is a gifted actor, a great American success story, an intriguing personality, and a political symbol; his life and career illuminate America's racial history.

A remarkable teenager who went from public assistance to a million dollar net worth shares his story and offers nine key principles to success. Farrah Gray is no ordinary teenager. He wears a suit and tie; he has an office on Wall Street and another one in Los Angeles...and he sold his first business at the age of 14 for more than a million dollars.

Compelling from cover to cover, this is the story of one of the most recorded and beloved jazz trumpeters of all time. With unsparing honesty and a superb eye for detail, Clark Terry, born in 1920, takes us from his impoverished childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, where jazz could be heard everywhere, to the smoke-filled small clubs and carnivals across the Jim Crow South where he got his start, and on to worldwide acclaim.

Lillian Lincoln Lambert rose from humble beginnings as a poor farm girl in the segregated South to become the first Black woman to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School and, later, the founder of a $20 million maintenance company with 1,200 employees. In The Road to Someplace Better, she shares an inspiring personal journey that took her from dead-end jobs in New York City and Washington, D.C., to the ivory tower and the world of entrepreneurship.

What can we learn about life, love, and artillery from an 82-year-old man whose favorite hobby is firing his homemade cannons? Visit by visit - often with his young daughters in tow - author Michael Perry is about to find out. Toiling in a shop Perry describes as "an antique store stocked by Rube Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small earthquake," Tom Hartwig makes gag shovel handles, parts for quarter-million-dollar farm equipment, and - now and then - batches of potentially "extralegal" explosives.

Thurgood Marshall was the most important American lawyer of the 20th century. He transformed the nation's legal landscape by challenging the racial segregation that had relegated millions to second-class citizenship. He won 29 of 33 cases before the United States Supreme Court, was a federal appeals court judge, served as the US solicitor general, and, for 24 years, sat on the Supreme Court. Marshall is best known for achievements after he relocated to New York in 1936 to work for the NAACP.