Cultural Memoir

Hannah Arendt was a polarizing cultural theorist—extolled by her peers as a visionary and berated by her critics as a poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1933. Arendt is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that surrounded her 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a kidnapped Nazi war criminal. In this comprehensive biography, Anne C. Heller tracks the source of Arendt’s contradictions and achievements to her sense of being a “conscious pariah”.

Modern Shanghai: a global city in the midst of a renaissance, where dreamers arrive each day to partake in a mad torrent of capital, ideas, and opportunity. Marketplace's Rob Schmitz is one of them. He immerses himself in his neighborhood, forging deep relationships with ordinary people who see in the city's sleek skyline a brighter future, and a chance to rewrite their destinies.

Shoshana Johnson, the first black female soldier in America's history to be taken as a prisoner of war, presents the much-anticipated story of her capture and imprisonment in Iraq and what happened after her rescue.

Geronimo's Story of His Life helped bridge the gap between Apache and American relations in a difficult time in American history. It is an outstanding memoir as the white man conquered the last of the Indian lands. Geronimo's dedication to peace between the American government and the Apache people is obvious. Even when the American government broke the peace treaty to allow his people to move to Florida unhindered, Geronimo remained honorable and maintained his side of the bargain.

Discover the stunning rise, fall, and legacy of N.W.A., one of America's most revered and iconic enduring music groups, who put their stamp on pop culture and black culture and who changed hip-hop music forever, in this comprehensive and authoritative work of music journalism. In 1986 a rap group was formed that would establish the foundation of gangsta rap and push the genre forward, electrifying fans with their visceral and profane lyrics that sensationalized street life and brazenly challenged the police system.

Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor.

In early 2019, after three years of careful planning, eighteen-year-old Rahaf Mohammed finally escaped her abusive family in Saudi Arabia—but made it only as far as Bangkok before being stripped of her passport. She knew that if she was forced to return home she would be killed, like the other rebel women in her country. As men pounded at the door of her barricaded hotel room, Rahaf created a Twitter account and reached out to the world. The world answered—she gained 45,000 followers in one day, followers who helped her seek asylum in the West.

Condoleezza Rice has until now remained a mystery behind an elegant, cool veneer. In this stunning new biography, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller peels back the layers and presents a revelatory portrait of the first Black female secretary of state and President George W. Bush's national security adviser on September 11, 2001. The audiobook relates the personal voyage of a young Black woman out of the segregated American South and also tells the sweeping story of a tumultuous half-century in the nation's history.

Born in the gold mining hot bed of Tarkwa, Ghana, T. P. Manus Ulzen is the oldest of 5 children. His parents were both educators. He grew up in Bolgatanga, Wa, Wenchi, Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi in Ghana until he was 12 years old. He started high school at the age of 10 at St. Augustine's College, Cape Coast and continued his education at Kabulonga School for Boys in Lusaka, Zambia after his family left Ghana following the 1966 coup which ended Nkrumah's first republic. He returned to Ghana to complete his high school education at Ghana Secondary Technical School, Takoradi.

Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown’s life growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965 and teaching in Canada from 1969. Told with stridency and humour, the stories include both personal experience and history. Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with persistent racial marginalization of Black people, both globally and in Canada, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and traces the outsider status of Africa and its peoples.

A Place to Stand is Jimmy Santiago Baca's memoir of childhood on the small farms of New Mexico, his adolescence spent in orphanages and detention centers, his years as a drug dealer in San Diego and Arizona, and his extraordinary personal transformation under the harrowing conditions behind bars. Life in prison was often brutal, and Baca describes the extreme measures he had to take to survive, which endowed him with an indomitable will to resist the dehumanization of prison life. The act of writing offered a powerful means of transcending his surroundings.

Published during a literary era marked by the ascendance of Black writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alex Haley, this thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown’s childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s.

Since his headline-grabbing speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Barack Obama has come to represent the promise of unity among groups of all types: blacks and whites; Democrats, Republicans, and moderates; the upper, middle, and lower classes. In this groundbreaking biography, veteran journalist and Obama chronicler David Mendell gives an in-depth, comprehensive portrait of a man whose name has become a catchphrase for hope in a politically jaded society desperate for a new star.

Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history, Anne Anlin Cheng’s original essays focus on art, politics, and popular culture. Through personal stories woven with a keen eye and an open heart, Cheng summons up the grief, love, anger, and humor in negotiating the realities of being a scholar, an immigrant Asian American woman, a cancer patient, a wife of a white man, and a mother of biracial children . . . all in the midst of the (extra)ordinary stresses of recent years.

The Male Gazed grapples with the thrall of masculinity, examining its frailty and its attendant anxieties even as it focuses on its erotic potential. Masculinity, Betancourt suggests, isn't suddenly ripe for deconstruction—or even outright destruction—amid so much talk about its inherent toxicity. Looking back over decades' worth of pop culture's attempts to codify and reframe what men can be, wear, do, and desire, this book establishes that to gaze at men is still a subversive act.

From heading an ashram at Rajneeshpuram, Oregon, USA, in the 1980s to allegedly spearheading what is known as the largest bioterror attack in American history and spending 39 months in prison, Ma Anand Sheela's life is one that fascinates and intrigues. But who is the woman beyond the persona of the commune leader? What is Sheela like behind the sensational "tough titties" avatar?

On September 11, 2001, Carmen bin Ladin heard the news that the Twin Towers had been struck. She instinctively knew that her brother-in-law was involved in these horrifying acts of terrorism, and her heart went out to America. She also knew that her life and the lives of her daughters would never be the same again.

The author of Population: 485 returns, delivering a truckload of humor, heart, and...gardening tips? Think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, complete with stock cars, sexy vegetables, and a laugh track. "All I wanted to do was fix my old pickup truck," says Michael Perry. "That, and plant my garden. Then I met this woman...." Truck: A Love Story recounts a year in which Perry struggles to grow his own food, live peaceably with his neighbors, and sort out his love life.

In his poetry, Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America, and in so doing, heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age.

Scarface is the celebrated rapper whose hits include "On My Block," "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" and "Damn It Feels Good to be a Gangsta" (made famous in the cult film Office Space). The former president of Def Jam South, he's collaborated with everyone from Kanye West, Ice Cube and Nas, and had many solo hits such as "Guess Who's Back" feat. Jay-Z and "Smile" feat. Tupac. But before that, he was a kid from Houston in love with rock-and-roll, listening to AC/DC and KISS.