Cultural Memoir

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?

We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments.

The definitive account of Louis Armstrong - his life and legacy - during the most creative period of his career. Thomas Brothers picks up where he left off with the acclaimed Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, following the story of the great jazz musician into his most creatively fertile years in the 1920s and early 1930s, when Armstrong created not one but two modern musical styles. Brothers wields tremendous skill in making the connections between history and music accessible to everyone.

Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author presents “a celebration of all things country music” (Ken Burns) as she reflects on her search for the first family of Black country music.

Junius Wilson (1908-2001) spent 76 years at a state mental hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, including 6 in the criminal ward. He had never been declared insane by a medical professional or found guilty of any criminal charge. But he was deaf and Black in the Jim Crow South. Unspeakable is the story of his life.

Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. During the occupation, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Paris were left behind where they would come face to face with the German conquerors on a daily basis, as waitresses, shop assistants, or wives and mothers, increasingly desperate to find food to feed their families as hunger became part of everyday life.

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow.

In the 34 years since his retirement, Henry Aaron’s reputation has only grown in magnitude: He broke existing records (rbis, total bases, extra-base hits) and set new ones (hitting at least 30 home runs per season 15 times, becoming the first player in history to hammer 500 home runs and three thousand hits). But his influence extends beyond statistics, and at long last here is the first definitive biography of one of baseball’s immortal figures.

Ben Greenman, New York Times best-selling author, contributing writer to The New Yorker, and owner of thousands of recordings of Prince and Prince-related songs, knows intimately that there has never been a rock star as vibrant, mercurial, willfully contrary, experimental, or prolific as Prince. Uniting a diverse audience while remaining singularly himself, Prince was a tireless artist, a musical virtuoso and chameleon, and a pop-culture prophet.

As a student of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, Howard Baskerville was aflame not only with the gospel of Jesus, but with the Wilsonian gospel that constitutional democracy is the birthright of all nations. Rather than become a small-town minister like his father in South Dakota, he volunteered for missionary service in Persia. Tabriz in 1907 was a hotbed of democratic revolution. Brilliant young firebrands were among Baskerville’s students at the Presbyterian school—and became his devoted friends. He lectured on freedom; they dedicated their lives to it.

Egyptian-born and London-raised, Alya Mooro grew up between two cultures and felt a pull from both. Where could she turn for advice and inspiration when it seemed there was nobody else like her? Today, Mooro is determined to explore and explode the myth that she must identify either as ‘Western’ or as one of almost 400 million other ‘Arabs’ across the Middle East.

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.

For Glory Edim, that "friend of my mind" is books. Edim, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants growing up in Virginia, started the popular Well-Read Black Girl book club at age 30, but her love of books stretches far back: to public libraries alongside her little brothers after elementary school while her mother was working; to high school libraries where she discovered books she wasn't being taught in class; to dorm rooms and airplanes and subway rides—and, eventually, to a community of half a million other listeners.

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.

On a Move is one of the most unimaginable stories of injustice and resilience in recent American history. But it is not only one of tragedy. It is about coming-of-age for a young activist, the strong ties of family, and, against all odds, learning how to take indignities on the chin and to work within the very system that created them. At once a harrowing personal account and an impassioned examination of racism and police violence, On a Move testifies to the power of love and hope, in the face of astonishing wrongdoing.

"Mississippi Hippie: A Life in 49 Pieces" invites you to embark on an extraordinary odyssey through the soul-stirring landscapes of the storied Mississippi Delta and the humming streetscapes of 1970s Memphis. Willy Bearden, a master storyteller, unveils his life's mosaic in a series of poignant and evocative vignettes that resonate with the echoes of a bygone era.

After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downward into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years.

Zippi Spitzer and David Wisnia were captivated by each other from the moment they first exchanged glances across the work floor. It was the beginning of a love story that could have happened anywhere. Except for one difference: this romance was unfolding in history’s most notorious death camp, between two young prisoners whose budding intimacy risked dooming them if they were caught.

Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.

Drawing on astute political analysis and extensive reporting from around the world, Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From illuminates a personal quest. Kamal Al-Solaylee, author of the bestselling and award-winning Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes and Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), yearns to return to his homeland of Yemen, now wracked by war, starvation and daily violence, to reconnect with his family.