Cultural Memoir

Long accused of racism and “white flight”, the ethnic Americans driven from their homes and neighborhoods—the author included—finally get the chance to tell their side of the story.

David Falkner, noted author of five previous books about baseball, deftly portrays the rise to stardom of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play on a major-league team in baseball’s modern era. As Falkner traces the development of Robinson’s natural skill and tireless dedication, he focuses on the strengths that earned Robinson a unique place on the diamond and in the struggle for civil rights. This compelling biography illuminates a critical intersection of sports and cultural history.

In the early hours of March 24th, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumbled with tanks as soldiers seized the presidential palace, overthrowing Argentina’s leader. To many, it seemed like just another coup in a continent troubled by them, amid political violence and Cold War tensions. But there was something darker about this new regime. A compelling mystery and deeply researched account of a pivotal era in world history, A Flower Traveled in My Blood takes listeners on a journey of love, resilience, and redemption, revealing new truths about memory, identity, and family.

"Monkey Weddings & Summer Sapphires" is a lovely telling of a childhood spent in Johannesburg, South Africa, and of settling into adult life and motherhood in Nova Scotia, Canada. Recipes, collected from travels, family, and friends allows the story to be told with the foods and dishes as the conveyance. The changing seasons, the natural wild beauty that surrounds everyday life, the abundance of wild edibles and local produce all serve as the inspiration to each chapter.

Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Long a site of peaceful resistance to the Assad regimes, Daraya fell under siege in 2012. For four years, no one entered or left, and aid was blocked. Every single day, bombs fell on this place - a place of homes and families. And then a group searching for survivors stumbled upon a cache of books in the rubble. In a week, they had 6,000 volumes; in a month, 15,000. A sanctuary was born: a library where people could escape the blockade, a paper fortress to protect their humanity.

A powerful wartime saga recounting the extraordinary story of the 761st Tank Battalion, the first all-Black armored unit to see combat in World War II.

Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood. Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that.

This story is about a man who had his feelings bottled up for way too long. Not able to tell his family why he did the things he did and not able to recoup the lost years away from the people who he loved. In the Mexican-American community, you never show your sadness, your pain, or weakness. As an act of pride, you always keep all your emotions to yourself like as if nothing is wrong. Showing everyone that you're not suffering and everything is fine is strength.

In this multi-biographical history of a family in India, Shantaben enters an arranged marriage at age 14. Before she can join her husband in Africa, she must serve his family for several years. Arriving in Kenya, Shantaben dreams of having her own family. But she finds no community, no support, and no medical resources. Their first year together claims the life of their child and nearly ends Shantaben’s. Sustained by her culture and faith, she survives.

By a prize-winning young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race, Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.

Years after his tragic death, Trayvon Martin’s name is still evoked every day. He has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a child still in the process of becoming a young man, wearing a hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one Black child’s death on a dark, rainy street in a small Florida town become the match that lit a civil rights crusade?

It's a story of the 1970s. Of a road trip in a wood-paneled station wagon, with the kids in the way-back, singing along to the Steve Miller Band. Brothers waking up early on Saturday mornings for five consecutive hours of cartoons and advertising jingles that they'll be humming all day. A father - one of 3M's greatest and last eight-track-salesman fathers - traveling across the country on the brand-new Boeing 747, providing for his family but wanting nothing more than to get home.

It hasn’t been easy being Michael Arceneaux. Equality for LGBTQ people has come a long way and all, but voices of persons of color within the community are still often silenced, and being Black in America is...well, have you watched the news? With the characteristic wit and candor that have made him one of today’s boldest writers on social issues, I Can’t Date Jesus is Michael Arceneaux’s impassioned, forthright, and refreshing look at minority life in today’s America.

Richard Pryor was arguably the single most influential performer of the second half of the twentieth century, and certainly he was the most successful black actor/comedian ever. Controversial and somewhat enigmatic in his lifetime, Pryor's performances opened up a new world of possibilities, merging fantasy with angry reality in a way that wasn't just new - it was heretofore unthinkable. His childhood in Peoria, Illinois, was spent just trying to survive.

Here is the Whitney only family would know.... Somewhere outside the glare of the concert spotlights...behind the tawdry entertainment news headlines...beyond the crush of the scandal-seeking paparazzi...lies the truth about Whitney Houston. And few individuals are better qualified to show us that complicated, funny, generous, troubled, extremely loyal Whitney than the friend she called "brother", Bebe Winans.

In 1971, Robin Green had an interview with Jann Wenner at the offices Rolling Stone magazine. Green thought she was interviewing for a clerical job like the other girls in the office, a "real job". Instead, she was hired as a journalist. Brutally honest and bold, Robin Green reveals what it was like to be the first woman granted entry into an iconic boys' club. Pulling back the curtain on Rolling Stone magazine in its prime, The Only Girl is a stunning tribute to a bygone era and a publication that defined a generation.

In 2006, after his father was killed, Gulwali Passarlay was caught between the Taliban, who wanted to recruit him, and the Americans, who wanted to use him. To protect her son, Gulwali's mother sent him away. The search for safety would lead the 12-year-old across eight countries, from the mountains of Eastern Afghanistan through Iran and Europe to Britain. Over the course of 12 harrowing months, Gulwali endured imprisonment, hunger, cruelty, brutality, loneliness, and terror - and nearly drowned crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

Steve Grant was laid off in March of 2020. He was fifty and had cancer, so he needed health insurance, fast. Which is how he found himself a rural letter carrier in Appalachia, back in his old hometown. Suddenly, he was the guy with the goods, delivering dog food and respirators and lube and heirloom tomato seeds and Lord of the Rings replica swords. A brash and loving portrait of an all-American institution, Mailman offers a deeply felt portrait of both rural America and the dedicated (and eccentric) letter carriers who keep our lives running smoothly day to day.

Growing up Aquinnah Wampanoag, Joseph Lee grappled with what it means to be an Indigenous person in the world today, especially as tribal land, culture, and community face new threats. Starting with the story of his own tribe, which is from the iconic Martha’s Vineyard, Lee tackles key questions around Indigenous identity and the stubborn legacy of colonialism. Lee weaves his own story—and that of his family—with conversations with Indigenous leaders, artists, and scholars from around the world about everything from culture and language to climate change and the politics of belonging.

Just after turning forty, Steve Grove left his life in Silicon Valley working as a Google executive to move back to his home state of Minnesota with his wife and fellow tech exec, Mary Grove, and their one-year-old twins. Gone from the Midwest for two decades, Grove returned home with fresh eyes. Yearning to put down new roots, he traded his job at Google for a position as the lead economic development official under Governor Tim Walz. Grove’s shift to leading a large government bureaucracy brought a sequence of struggles and triumphs vividly portrayed with both humor and affection.