Cultural Memoir

When acclaimed Washington Post writer Wil Haygood had an early hunch that Obama would win the 2008 election, he thought he'd highlight the singular moment by exploring the life of someone who had come of age when segregation was so embedded in the culture as to make the very thought of a black president inconceivable. He struck gold when he tracked down Eugene Allen, a butler who had served eight presidents, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. Forest Whitaker narrates the story of this remarkable man who, while serving tea and supervising buffets, was also a witness to history.

Whilst it’s impossible to capture the essence of Nigeria in one story, its writers have given listeners the opportunity to experience the many different parts that make up Africa’s most populous nation. In Of This Our Country, acclaimed and award-winning Nigerian writers go a step further and describe their Nigeria, sharing personal essays about a country that holds so much more than any one perspective could. Through the words of these writers, a living portrait of Nigeria is woven, one that is as beautiful as it is complex.

Award-winning author Lisandro Perez tells Cuba's story through the lens of a single family: his own. The House on G Street is a unique depiction of one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century, told through generations of ancestors whose lives were shaped by dramatic historical forces. Perez disentangles the complex history by following his family's thread, imbuing political events with personal meaning. Their story begins with emigration to Cuba and follows the waning years of the colony.

Kenneth Clark was the grandest figure in the arts in Britain in the 20th century. Museum director, patron, pioneer of television, cultural panjandrum, he effortlessly dominated the art world for over half a century. Clark belonged to that stratum of society that used to be called "the top people" and was befriended by both the Queen Mother and Winston Churchill. His closest friendships, however, were amongst writers and artists, men such as John Betjeman, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and John Piper.

On her 17th birthday in 1973, Janice Hunter met Marvin Gaye - the soulful prince of Motown with the seductive liquid voice whose chart-topping, socially conscious album What's Going On made him a superstar two years earlier. Despite a 16-year-age difference and Marvin's marriage to the sister of Berry Gordy, Motown's founder, the star-struck teenager and the emotionally volatile singer began a scorching relationship.

Whitney Houston (1963-2012) was a superstar. Few in the world of show business reach the career heights that she attained with what seemed such ease. Her megastardom peaked in 1992 with the release of the hit movie The Bodyguard and the international number-one hit "I Will Always Love You". The movie soundtrack still stands as one of the best-selling albums of all time. She won six Grammy Awards, two Emmy Awards, thirty Billboard Music Awards, and twenty-two American Music Awards, and amassed a vast fortune. Her death has shocked the entertainment world and her fans.

What would life be like for a Black boy growing up in Nazi Germany? This unprecedented autobiography answers that question with the spellbinding true story of Hans J. Massaquoi’s life in Hamburg during the height of Hitler’s regime. Hans is the son of a Black Liberian diplomat father and a white German mother. His father returns to Africa at the beginning of the war, leaving them behind in poverty without the means to flee. Within this tense atmosphere, increasingly violent Nazi policies and Allied bombing raids make Hans and his mother’s lives a day-to-day survival struggle.

डॉ. बाबासाहेब आंबेडकर हे नाव आज सर्वांत आदरणीय भारतीयांच्या नामावलीत घेतलं जातं आणि देशभरातील त्यांच्या पुतळ्यांची संख्या महात्मा गांधींच्या पुतळ्यांखालोखाल असेल. किंबहुना, आधुनिक काळातील 'सर्वांत थोर भारतीय' ठरवण्यासाठी अलीकडे एक मतचाचणी घेण्यात आली, त्यात दोन कोटींहून अधिक मतं नोंदवली गेली आणि त्यात आंबेडकरांना गांधींपेक्षा जास्त मतं मिळाली होती.

Esther Amini grew up in Queens, New York, during the free-wheeling 1960s. She also grew up in a Persian-Jewish household, the American- born daughter of parents who had fled Mashhad, Iran. In Concealed, she tells the story of being caught between these two worlds: the dutiful daughter of tradition-bound parents who hungers for more self-determination than tradition allows.

North Korea is one of the most troubled societies on earth. The country's 24 million people live under a violent dictatorship led by a single family, which relentlessly pursues the development of nuclear arms, which periodically incites risky military clashes with the larger, richer, liberal South, and which forces each and every person to play a role in the "theater state" even as it pays little more than lip service to the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority.

From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be unkind to scholars with such encyclopaedic interests. All too often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their valuable achievements. In this engaging, erudite account, renowned cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view.

The Soul of Baseball is as much the story of Buck O'Neil as it is the story of baseball. Driven by a relentless optimism and his two great passions - for America's pastime and for jazz, America's music - O'Neil played solely for love. In an era when greedy, steroid-enhanced athletes have come to characterize professional ball, Posnanski offers a salve for the damaged spirit: the uplifting life lessons of a truly extraordinary man who never missed an opportunity to enjoy and love life.

As the only African-American soloist dancing with the prestigious American Ballet Theatre, Misty Copeland has made history. But when she first placed her hands on the barre at an after-school community center, no one expected the undersized, anxious 13-year-old to become a ground­breaking ballerina. Life in Motion is a story of passion and grace for anyone who has dared to dream of a different life.

First published in 1789, this autobiography of Olaudah Equiano comprises a variety of styles, such as a slavery narrative, travel tale, and spiritual journey. It recounts Equiano's time as a slave, and chronicles his attempts at becoming an independent man through his study of the Bible, and his eventual success in gaining his freedom.

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.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.

When it comes to Skinheads, I see a lot of people these days re-writing history, whitewashing the youth cult or bending the truth to suit their political narrative. I spent over ten years of my young life as a London Bootboy and became one of the most famous Skinheads in the world. Being a Skinhead had a profound effect on me. Even though I walked away from that life, and left it in the last century, I still feel the shockwaves of my experience and still find people with nefarious agendas trying to tell their version of my story.

Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

The '90s was the decade when British culture reclaimed its position at the artistic centre of the world. Not since the 'Swinging Sixties' had art, comedy, fashion, film, football, literature and music interwoven into a blooming of national self-confidence. It was the decade of Lad Culture and Girl Power, of Blur vs Oasis. When fashion runways shone with British talent, Young British Artists became household names, football was 'coming home' and British film went worldwide.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.