Showing results by narrator "JD Jackson" in All Categories

An examination of African American imagery and participation in American movies includes a timeline of important African American events in film history and discusses the achievements of noted celebrities.

In this new collection of short stories, vignettes, and autobiographical sketches - many previously unpublished - Charles Willeford, author of Miami Blues and The Burnt Orange Heresy creates a mosaic of the absurdities of life in the 20th century. From a malicious grandmother to prophetic depictions of the power of reality television, with his wry humor and sudden shifts to violence, he seduces, amuses, and repeatedly surprises you.

Nicknamed Dewey Decimal for his obsessive attempts to bring order to the New York Public Library in the wake of disastrous events in the city, the hero of this series earns his keep as a bagman and enforcer for unscrupulous politicians and underworld figures. Now, he’s stumbled upon information concerning the gruesome murder of a prostitute that involves a prominent US senator - and finds himself chasing ghosts and fighting for his life, pursued by private military contractors and the ever-present specter of his own past....

Dubbed “Dewey Decimal” for his desire to reorganize the library’s stock, he gets by as bagman and muscle for New York City’s unscrupulous district attorney. He takes no pleasure in this kind of civic dirty work. He’d be perfectly content alone among his books. But this is not in the cards, as the DA calls on Dewey for a seemingly straightforward union-busting job.

Some locales seem to come with their own soundtrack. Don Ho and his tiny bubbles provide the background music for Hawaii, Edith Piaf for Paris. The reggae of Bob Marley evokes Jamaica. The soundtrack for Alabama is without question provided by our troubled troubadour Hank Williams. The 2016 biography Hank by Mark Ribowsky paints a dark picture of the musician's short, alcoholic, drug-filled life: a life of loneliness and pain. He goes so far as to call Hank's life story "noir-ish"....

It's been a thousand years since the Rising. Earth is a wasteland, and a holy order of knights is all that stands between what remains of civilization and the brigands and demons trying to bring it all down. When the oldest of these knights, Abe, isn't trying to keep his brothers in line, he's tirelessly attempting to decode the riddles that have guided the Knights Eternal for the past two centuries. The visions Abe's been having aren't helping matters.

Thursday Night Lights tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of African American high school football in Texas. Drawing on interviews, newspaper stories, and memorabilia, Michael Hurd introduces the players, coaches, schools, and towns where African Americans built powerhouse football programs under the PVIL leadership. He covers 50 years (1920-1970) of high school football history.

A family emergency brings former rapper and current real estate mogul Ivan Spencer back to his long-abandoned hometown. While there, he must deal with his confused mother, his elderly, philandering father, his flaky sister, an unreliable aunt, and a face from the past who makes him question some of his earlier decisions. All he wants to do is to get things squared away and return to his life, but as it turns out, he must deal with his own issues first.

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth.

Six months before aging out of foster care, 17-year-old Tori meets a local hustler who makes her an offer she can’t refuse. At first, she enjoys the benefits of being Ricky’s “new girl,” but it’s not long before he’s looking for a return on his investment. After a confrontation with Ricky spirals out of control, Tori goes on the run. Halfway across the country, she meets Dana, a street-wise woman in a similarly desperate situation. The two become quick friends and hatch a plan to move to Reno. But soon Tori is on her own again - and out for revenge.

From the pulpy pages of Black Mask Magazine in the 1920s and '30s, through the film noir era of the 1940s, to today, noir fiction has lured many a reader and movie-goer away from the light and into the dark underbelly of society. Names such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain; titles like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Postman Always Rings Twice...these have inhabited our collective consciousness for decades. Humanity, it seems, loves the dark. And within the dark, one figure stands out: that of the femme fatale.

A must-have for football fans of all ages, this handsomely designed gift book is a comprehensive audio guide to the greatest traditions and rivalries in college football. Every Saturday each fall, millions of Americans watch their favorite college teams take to the gridiron, battling to make it...

At the age of nine, Issac J. Bailey saw his hero, his eldest brother, taken away in handcuffs, not to return from prison for thirty-two years. Bailey tells the story of their relationship and of his experience living in a family suffering guilt and shame. Drawing on sociological research as well as his expertise as a journalist, he seeks to answer the crucial question of why Moochie and many other young black men - including half of the ten boys in his own family - end up in the criminal justice system. What role did poverty, race, and faith play? What effect did living in the South, in the Bible Belt, have?

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes...

Frederick Douglass’s celebrated memoir is among the most influential works of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement in the United States. Beginning with his birth on a Maryland plantation in 1818, Douglass’s account records the tyranny and brutality of his life in slavery until his ultimate escape to New Bedford, Massachusetts, at the age of twenty.

Detroit-based homicide detective John Barnes has seen it all - literally. Thanks to a technologically advanced brain machine, detectives have access to the memories of the living, the dying, and the recently dead. But extracting victims' experiences firsthand and personally reliving everything up to the final, brutal moments of their lives - the sights, the sounds, the scents, the pain - is also the punishment reserved for the criminals themselves. Barnes has had enough. Enough of the memories that aren't his. Enough of the horror.

An eye-opening look at the life and legacy of Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball and became an American hero.

An insightful portrait of Muhammad Ali from the New York Times bestselling author of At the Altar of Speed and The Big Bam. It centers on the cultural and political implications of Ali's refusal of service in the military—and the key moments in a life that was as high profile and...

Trayvon Martin’s parents take readers beyond the news cycle with an account only they could give: the intimate story of a tragically foreshortened life and the rise of a movement. “A reminder—not only of Trayvon’s life and death but of the vulnerability of black lives in a country...

In Drama in the Bahamas, Dave Hannigan tells the occasionally poignant, often troubling, yet always entertaining story behind Ali's last bout. Through interviews with many of those involved, he discovers exactly how and why, a few weeks short of his 40th birthday, a seriously diminished Ali stepped through the ropes one more time to get beaten up by Trevor Berbick.