Cultural Memoir

Northwestern Mexico is comprised of the Baja California Peninsula, the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez), and the states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Nayarit. The Sierra Madre Occidental, a major mountain range system of the North American Cordillera, runs northwest-southeast through northwestern and western Mexico, and along the Gulf of California. Summits mostly exceed elevations of six thousand feet (1,048 meters), and some peaks rise above ten thousand feet (three thousand meters).

Al Jolson, born Asa Yoelson, immigrated from a shtetl in Lithuania to the United States in 1894 after his father secured a job as a rabbi in Washington, D.C. A poor, Yiddish-speaking newcomer navigating a racially segregated and antisemitic America, young Jolson dreamed of becoming a star, and he did. Through Jolson, Bernstein simultaneously breaks open the history and legacy of the cultural sensation The Jazz Singer. Not only was The Jazz Singer the first feature-length film with synchronized music and dialogue, but it was also taboo smashing in its content.

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.

As the world's attention traces the reluctant social advances in the Middle East, Princess Sultana and her female friends and family have stepped forward to rescue young women in the region who are cruelly mistreated by their husbands, their fathers, and the brutish ISIS soldiers who kidnap them. But inside the Princess' lavish Saudi Arabian palace, sparks of anger and bolts of fear crackle because of the secrets kept to forward her efforts to help women and children.

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.

Growing up in New Jersey as the only African American Muslim at school, Ibtihaj Muhammad always had to find her own way. When she discovered fencing, a sport traditionally reserved for the wealthy, she had to defy expectations and make a place for herself in a sport she grew to love. From winning state championships to three-time All-America selections at Duke University, Ibtihaj was poised for success, but the fencing community wasn't ready to welcome her with open arms just yet.

Welcome to Madison Park, a small community in Alabama founded by freed slaves in 1880. And meet Eric Motley, a native son who came of age in this remarkable place where constant lessons in self-determination, hope, and unceasing belief in the American dream taught him everything he needed for his journey to the Oval Office as a Special Assistant to President George W. Bush. This charming, engaging, and deeply inspiring memoir will help you remember that we can create a world of shared values based on love and hope.

Unrealized Reality is not just a memoir; it is a witness to the power of truth, the resilience forged through life’s trials, and the beauty that can arise from even the deepest wounds. Stephanie’s story reveals that healing is a journey, not a destination, and that strength is often born from our willingness to face life raw and real, without distortion.

In these nine essays, Susan Lieberman is exploring The Country of Old, in which she finds herself a new immigrant. She examines the difficulties of leaving "that other place" and making sense of this new country. Lieberman's touch is light but her analysis of the challenges/opportunities of aging is provocative. "If we are not old, then we are dead," she notes. And if we are, indeed, not dead then how can we live well in this moment in our life span?

A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was 10 years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over her lifetime her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood, and the death of children.

In late December 2008, Ian Halperin told the world that Michael Jackson had only six months to live. His investigation into Jackson`s failing health made headlines around the globe. Six months and a day later, the King of Pop was dead.It was greed that killed Michael Jackson. Friends and associates paint a tragic picture of the last years and days of his life as Jackson made desperate attempts to prepare for a planned concert series at London's 02 Arena in July 2009.

Jack Ma is the quintessential simpleton who has a big heart and wants everyone to share in prosperity. He comes from humble beginnings, had trouble getting to school, had trouble finding a job, but did everything right despite the forces that were arrayed against his intentions. We all have that life where we feel the world just doesn’t value what we have to offer. Jack certainly felt that way, but eventually he found his stride. Today he sits at the top of a global behemoth that boasts sales of $1 billion in the first five minutes of its annual sales event.

In his sparkling memoir, M.K. Raina documents the many lives he has lived. From sharing the stage with some of the most celebrated actors in India to his journey as a young man witnessing the violence and horrors rampant through the streets of Kashmir, an entire history of northern India is painted with subtle elegance. Brimming with delightful anecdotes as well as poignant, painful memories of a region that once was, this book is a tour de force.

Almost every Latina has heard the phrase calladita te ves más bonita—you look most beautiful when you are silent. It's a message rooted in machismo passed from generation to generation, and one that poet and Latine therapist, Kim Guerra, grew up on. In Badass Bonita, Guerra tells a story of coming into her own power, and guides listeners through the process of finding their own. Rejecting what she was taught as a girl, she learned to use her voice and the more she listened to that inner niña, the more she unearthed her inner guerrera.

In 2017, Raquel Willis took to the National Women’s March podium just after the presidential election of Donald Trump, primed to tell her story as a young Black transgender woman from the South. Despite having her speaking time cut short, the appearance only deepened her commitment to speaking up for communities on the margins. In this memoir, Raquel Willis recounts with passion and candor her experiences straddling the Obama and Trump eras, the possibility of transformation after tragedy, and how complex moments can push us all to take necessary risks and bloom toward collective liberation.

New York Times-bestselling author Elijah Wald, one of the most wide-ranging and respected writers on blues and popular music, traces the beginnings of the music that became our national soundtrack. Using Morton’s life and songs as a connecting thread, Jelly Roll Blues suggests an alternate history of blues and jazz, surveying a world of Black and working class culture that at times seems startlingly modern.

Xiaolu Guo has been lauded as a "voice . . . speaking with full freedom" (Wall Street Journal), which has made her one of the most acclaimed Chinese-born writers of her generation. Her new memoir, Radical, is an exploration of a city, an electrically honest rendering of what it means to be an outsider, and the sojourn that upended her sense of self as a woman, partner, mother, and artist.

Chris Dombrowski was playing a numbers game: two passions - poetry and fly-fishing; two children, one of them in utero; and an income hovering perilously close to zero. Enter, at this particularly challenging moment, a miraculous email: can't go, it's all paid for, just book a flight to Miami. Thus began a journey that would lead to the Bahamas and to David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide.

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass covers the life of the prominent abolitionist during and after the Civil War. Here, Douglass provides a fuller account of his escape from slavery and the underground railway to freedom. It includes his recollections of presidents Garfield and Lincoln, Johnson and Garfield, and an account of his service as Marshall of the District of Columbia.

The mixed population is the fastest-growing group in the UK today, but the mainstream conversation around mixedness is stilted, repetitive and often problematic. At a time when ethnically ambiguous models fill our Instagram feeds and our high street shop windows, and when children of interracial relationships are lauded as heralding in the dawn of a post-racial utopia, journalist Natalie Morris takes a deep dive into what it really means to be mixed in Britain today.