Showing results by narrator "J. D. Jackson" in All Categories

Michael Jordan credits George Mumford with transforming his on-court leadership of the Bulls, helping Jordan lead the team to six NBA championships. Mumford also helped Kobe Bryant, Andrew Bynum, and Lamar Odom and countless other NBA players turn around their games. A widely respected public speaker and coach, Mumford is sharing his own story and the strategies that have made these athletes into stars in The Mindful Athlete: The Secret to Pure Performance.

Number One bestseller John Grisham returns with his most suspenseful thriller yet. Given the importance of what they do, and the controversies that often surround them, and the violent people they sometimes confront, it is remarkable that in the history of the USA only four active federal judges have been murdered. Judge Raymond Fawcett just became number five. His body was found in the small basement of a lakeside cabin he had built himself and frequently used on weekends.

This story was going to begin like all the best stories. With a school bus falling from the sky. But no one saw it happen. They were all too busy - Jason Reynolds conjures 10 tales (one per block) about what happens after the dismissal bell rings and brilliantly weaves them into one wickedly funny, piercingly poignant look at the detours we face on the walk home, and in life. 

We Are the Change We Seek is a collection of Barack Obama's 26 greatest addresses: beginning with his 2002 speech opposing the Iraq War and closing with his final speech before the United Nations in September 2016. As president, Obama's words had the power to move the country, and often the world, as few presidents before him.

Amid rising gang violence, the crack epidemic, and police brutality, a group of unlikely voices cut through the chaos of late 1980s Los Angeles: N.W.A. Led by a drug dealer, a glammed-up producer, and a high school kid, N.W.A. gave voice to disenfranchised African Americans across the country. And they quickly redefined pop culture across the world. Their names remain as popular as ever: Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube. Dre soon joined forces with Suge Knight to create the combustible Death Row Records.

First published in 1853 amidst rumors that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with one of his slaves, Clotel is a fictional chronicle of one such child. After Jefferson's death, his mistress and her two daughters are auctioned. One daughter, Clotel, is purchased by a white man from Virginia who impregnates her. Despite the promise of marriage, Clotel is instead sold to another man and separated from her daughter. After escaping from the slave dealer, Clotel returnss to Virginia to reunite with her daughter - now a slave in her father's house.

In Playing for Keeps, David Halberstam takes the first full measure of Michael Jordan's epic career, one of the great American stories of our time. A narrative of astonishing power and human drama, brimming with revealing anecdotes and penetrating insights, the audiobook chronicles the forces in Jordan's life that have shaped him into history's greatest basketball player and the larger forces that have converged to make him the most famous living human being in the world. 

Southern fables usually go the other way around. A white woman is killed or harmed in some way, real or imagined, and then, like the moon follows the sun, a black man ends up dead. But when it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules - a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger working the backwoods towns of Highway 59, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about his home state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.

Someone found him in a laundry basket at the Quick Wash, wrapped in a towel, a few hours old and close to death. They called him "Baby Moses" when they shared his story on the ten o'clock news.

This audiobook by best-selling author John Eckhardt contains Scripture verses related to the topics of worship, holiness, and the glory of God as well as insight from the author himself. It is an excellent and handy reference tool for those who want to have a greater understanding of these important subjects in Scripture and to incorporate God’s Word into their prayers.   

To ex-detective John Barnes, the machine is a dangerous and abhorrent addiction. The criminal thoughts it embedded in his brain helped him stop a serial killer, but they left him dazed - with pounding, murderous impulses. Having turned in his badge to salvage what’s left of his psyche, Barnes must return to the darkness at the request of his former partner. A little girl has gone missing. So has Adrian Flaherty, the detective in the kidnapper’s shadow. And only Barnes can hear the clues. But the trail is more dizzying and more personal than he feared.

Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the Black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries? In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding Black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of Blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer Black college graduates than would otherwise exist.

It's 1996, and in Houston a mayoral election is looming. As usual the campaign focuses on Pleasantville. Axel Hathorne, former chief of police, was all set to become Houston's first black mayor. But his lead is slipping thanks to Sandy Wolcott, a defence lawyer. And then, just as the competition intensifies, a girl goes missing, apparently while canvassing for Axel. And when her body is found, Axel's nephew is charged with her murder.

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the 20th 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 of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the 400-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow.

As a conductor for the Underground Railroad - the covert resistance network created to aid and protect slaves seeking freedom - William Still helped as many as 800 people escape enslavement. He also meticulously collected the letters, biographical sketches, arrival memos, and ransom notes of the escapees. The Underground Railroad Records is an archive of primary documents that trace the narrative arc of the greatest, most successful campaign of civil disobedience in American history.

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which was unavailable for more than 10 years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering.

When East, a low-level lookout for a Los Angeles drug organisation, loses his watch house in a police raid, his boss recruits him for a very different job: a road trip - straight down the middle of white, rural America - to assassinate a judge in Wisconsin. Having no choice, East and a crew of untested boys - including his trigger-happy younger brother, Ty - leave the only home they've ever known in a nondescript blue van, with a roll of cash, a map and a gun they shouldn't have. Along the way, the country surprises East. 

Spanning more than 200 years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism.

Loose Balls is, after all these years, the definitive and most widely respected history of the ABA. It's a wild ride through some of the wackiest, funniest, strangest times ever to hit pro sports -- told entirely through the (often incredible) words of those who played, wrote and connived their way through the league's nine seasons.

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 plantation owner Edwin Epps, who tested Northup’s tenacity and self-control under the most brutal conditions. Until fate brought a Canadian abolitionist to Epps’s farm, Northup thought he would never draw another free breath.