Cultural Memoir

An inspiring story of a modern American icon, here is the first comprehensive account of the life and times of Michelle Obama. With disciplined reporting and a storyteller’s eye for revealing detail, Peter Slevin follows Michelle to the White House from her working-class childhood on Chicago’s largely segregated South Side. He illuminates her tribulations at Princeton University and Harvard Law School during the racially charged 1980s and the dilemmas she faced in Chicago.

Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad was praised by the New Yorker as “an evocative portrait,” and by the Chicago Tribune as “superb.” It is a gripping and accessible portrait of the heroic woman who guided more than 300 slaves to freedom and who is expected to be the face of the new $20 bill. Harriet Tubman was born a slave and dreamed of being free. She was willing to risk everything - including her own life - to see that dream come true. After her daring escape, Harriet became a conductor on the secret Underground Railroad.

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of “messy, beautiful, joyful Black people.”

Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, Seacole set out independently to the Crimea where she acted as doctor and 'mother' to wounded soldiers while running her business, the 'British Hotel'. A witness to key battles, she gives vivid accounts of how she coped with disease, bombardment and other hardships at the Crimean battlefront.

Tony Dungy's words and example have intrigued millions of people, particularly following his victory in Super Bowl XLI, the first for an African-American coach. How is it possible for a coach—especially a football coach—to win the respect of his players and lead them to the Super Bowl without the screaming histrionics, the profanities, the demand that the sport come before anything else? How is it possible for anyone to be successful without compromising faith and family?

The epic, rollicking, up-and-down life of Muddy Waters—who went from Mississippi farmhand to musical legend, invented electric blues, and created the template for the rock-and-roll band and its wild lifestyle—is chronicled with rare vividness in Robert Gordon’s widely praised biography.

To many in the age of Obama, America had succeeded in "going beyond race", putting the divisions of the past behind us. And then 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and then Baltimore blew up; and then gunfire shattered a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly the entire country awakened to a stark fact: Young Black men are an endangered species.

Everything you wanted to know about France but were too afraid to ask... At eighteen Lucy Wadham abandoned England and fell into the arms of a Frenchman. Twenty-five years later, having married, had children, and divorced in France, Lucy is perfectly placed to explore the differences between our two countries. Here she examines every aspect of French life - from sex and adultery to money, happiness, race and politics - in this funny and engrossing account of our most intriguing neighbour.

"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.

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.

Rachel Shabi was born in Israel to Jewish Iraqi parents. When she was a child her family emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1974. Their leaving reversed the spiritual trek of the Jewish Diaspora, around the world whose members wistfully repeat at the Passover tables, "Next year in Jerusalem." Years later, in fact, Shabi went back to visit and to live for an extended period, but her attitude toward her former homeland is conflicted by the longstanding discrimination suffered by Arab Jews in Israel.

In 1932, a Jamaican man named Leonard Percival Howell began leading nonviolent protests in Kingston, Jamaica, against British colonial rule. While history books rightly credit Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. with popularizing nonviolent protest strategies in later years, little is known about Leonard Howell and his vision of self-reliance—poor people working together to build a society of their own

Shame on Me is a personal and powerful exploration of history and identity, colour and desire from a writer who, having been plagued with confusion about her race all her life, has at last found kinship and solidarity in story.

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.

With brutal honesty and his trademark take-no-prisoners humor, Tracy tells the story of his rise to fame, with all its highs and its many lows - from the very public battles with alcohol and diabetes that threatened both his career and his life to the private and poignant end of his 20-year marriage. In his singularly warped and brilliant way, he muses on family, love, sex, race, politics, ambition, and what it takes to bring the funny.

Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems.

Miles to Go is a frank and intimate exploration of Miles Davis' eccentric working life, drug habits, paranoia, depression, and subsequent recovery. Murphy explores Davis' troubled relationship with his children and the controversial role Cicely Tyson played in his life. The book also delves into the dynamics that made Davis' band work so well together, placing Davis' work in a historic, literary, and musical framework.

In the summer of 2000, the most decorated soldier in Israel's history - Ehud Barak - set himself a challenge as daunting as any he had faced on the battlefield: to secure a final peace with the Palestinians. He would propose two states for two peoples, with a shared capital in Jerusalem. He knew the risks of failure. But he also knew the risks of not trying: letting slip perhaps the last chance for a generation to secure genuine peace. It was a moment of truth.

Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two ancient lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that seem to hold both the turbulent memories of the region's past and the secret of its enduring allure. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a historic crossroads.

Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father White. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early 20s was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen.