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AALBC.com's Best
Selling Books
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Fiction |
Nonfiction |
| #1
Bad
Girlz: A Novel
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by
Shannon Holmes
ISBN: 074348620X
Format: Paperback, 224pp
Pub. Date: October 2003
Publisher: Atria Books
The bestselling author of
B-More Careful, Shannon Holmes, delivers Bad Girlz, another wild
adventure into the streets. The setting this time is the Badlands, one of
the toughest and poorest communities in Philadelphia.
Bad Girlz takes you into the mysterious and often dangerous lives of
young women who turn to the streets and strip clubs as a means of survival.
These are girls who, along the way, suffer bad breaks and find themselves
ripe for exploitation by men and women who pretend to be their saviors.
Tender and Goldie were taken under wing by Kat, a veteran stripper, who
enjoyed the life and the risks she had to take to stay in the mix of the sex
trade. Both of these young and beautiful girls had ended up in dire straits
and in need of Kat's help in different ways, but ultimately for the same
reasons: They lacked the love and support that most of us expect to get at
home and in our communities. Where they live, illegal money is often the
only money to be made, and the difference between the law and the outlaw is
tough to discern. |
#1
Satan,
I'm Taking Back My Health!
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by
Jawanza Kunjufu
ISBN: 0913543675
Format: Paperback, 200pp
Pub. Date: March 2000
Publisher: African American Images
This unique look at health care interprets scriptures of the Bible and adapts
and applies the wisdom found there to modern ways of life. These scriptures
teach that the prevention of diseases is not in the hands of doctors, but rather
in what individuals eat and how they live. Health-minded Americans will learn
how to avoid the disease-causing preservatives, growth hormones, and pesticides
of the meat and dairy industries that pollute the once-fresh foods that the
public consumes. Also included is an in-depth discussion of Satan's influence on
the advertising industry and how it is linked to drug, cigarette, and alcohol
addictions among the American people. |
| #2
Black
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by Tracy Brown
ISBN: 0970247281
Format: Paperback
Pub. Date: November 2003
Publisher: Triple Crown Publications
Who said the streets don’t love nobody? Black is the novel that shatters the
myth. Kaia didn’t choose the streets. The streets chose her. Tossed from a
broken home, Kaia is forced to learn the hard way just how grimy street life can
be.
Shedding her innocents, Kaia, overnight it seems, goes from being an often
overlooked, stepped upon and crushed little girl, to a woman. She
endures all of the drama that is thrown her way, sometimes catching it and
sometimes being knocked flat on her ass. To aid in softening the blow is Aaron.
Even street fairy tales has a Prince. Experiencing seclusion and imprisonment
wile locked down in street dreams and the illusion called love, is Aaron a
Savior or Satin?
With enemies in disguise, Kaia fights for survival and freedom, but to survive
the streets could mean suffocating the freedom of her mind. Like a captured
black butterfly, Kaia struggles to emerge and triumph, but victory ain’t always
sweet, as a matter of fact, sometimes it’s bitter to the end.
|
#2
Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land
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by Randall
Robinson
ISBN: 0525947582
Format: Hardcover, 288pp
Pub. Date: January 2004
Publisher: Dutton Adult
Randall Robinson is quitting America, and this book charts his journey from
the most powerful nation on earth to the tiny tropical island where his wife was
born. His search for a more peaceful and hospitable place grew out of the
disappointment and increasing sense of abandonment he felt in the land of his
own birth-an America that has sapped the creative energies of his race and has
"transfigured humanity."
|
| #3
A
Hustler's Wife
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by
Turner, Nikki
ISBN:
0970247257
Format: Paperback, 259pp
Pub. Date: March 2003
Publisher:
Triple Crown Publications
Sweet innocent Yarni, from a well-to do family, by chance, meets
Richmond's notorious drug kingpin, Des. Immediately they develop an
astronomical love, which separates her from her family and friends. But when
Des, is sentenced to life in prison, she will learn, being a hustler's wife
isn't as easy, with her sole provider behind bars.
Travel with Yarni, as she survives when the script if flipped. At times
she plays the game, and at other times...the game plays her. Her journey is
filled with laughter, tears, failures, triumphs and perseverance.
Nikki's debut novel is a smorgasbord of manipulation, street-life, greed,
betrayal, envy, money, power and revenge. |
#3
Donald
Writes No More: A Biography of Donald Goines
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ISBN:
087067949X
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Pub. Date: October 2001
Publisher: Holloway House Publishing Company
by
Eddie Stone
Donald Goines was all of these things. He started
as a kid, the product of a middle-class family. After high school he joined
the Navy, and discovered the heroin that would rule the remainder of his
life. On the streets, he turned to writing when he was straight enough to
keep at it. He used the language of the streets and wrote of the streets and
its people. His success was immediate and exciting, But eventually the
streets claimed him. He was murdered as he sat writing a new book. Here for
the first time is the completed story. |
| #4
Dumb
as Me: Women Gave Him Comfort, Misusing Them Gave Him More
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by Michael Gainer
ISBN: 0971488703
Format: Paperback, 208pp
Pub. Date: July 2002
Publisher: Plutonium Publishing, LLC
Justin just wanted to enjoy life. After all, being a player seemed to come
naturally. Pimp'in women and breaking hearts was his specialty. If only his
player hate'in wife Alexis would conform to the rules of the game, that would
make life even better.
Justin can't take all the credit for his fabulous lifestyle, there are a cast of
characters contributing to his lifelong pursuit of conquering women. There is
his boy Hammer who maintains VIP status in all of Miami's clubs, Sheila, the
hotel maid with the "oh so fat a--," his loving yet high rolling Mom Sylvia and
his estranged father Henry (affectionately referred to as "The Rooster").
Settle in with Dumb as Me and experience a day in the life of Justin Drake, THE
MAN.
Not to forget...the intoxicating, mysterious Eden. The one woman that manages to
show Justin just what pimp'in is |
#4
Darkwater:
Voices from within the Veil
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by W. E. B. Du Bois
ISBN: 0486408906
Format: Paperback, 256pp
Pub. Date: September 1999
Publisher: Dover Publications, Incorporated
A tireless, impassioned champion of civil rights, William Edward Burghardt Du
Bois (1868-1963) forged a distinguished career as an author, editor, and leader
in the civil rights movement. The architect of the Niagara Movement (forerunner
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), Du Bois
employed his skills as an eloquent, immensely knowledgeable writer and public
speaker to help shape the revolt of black intellectuals against the conciliatory
policies of Booker T. Washington.
This collection of fiery essays, sketches, and poems--first published nearly
80 years ago in the Atlantic, the Journal of Race Development and other
periodicals--dates from the zenith of Du Bois' political influence in the United
States. Reflecting the author's political, historical, and artistic ideas,
Darkwater has long moved and inspired readers with its militant cry for social,
political, and economic reforms for black Americans.
Like Du Bois' highly influential The Souls of Black Folk, the present work is
essential reading for students of African-American history and anyone interested
in the history of the civil rights movement.
|
| #5
The
Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni
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ISBN: 0060541334
Format: Hardcover, 496pp
Pub. Date: November 2003
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Read an AALBC.com Review
The first of its kind, this omnibus collection covers Nikki
Giovanni's complete work of poetry from three decades, 1968-1998. The
Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni contains Giovanni's first seven volumes
of poetry: Black Feeling Black Talk, Black Judgment, Re: Creation, My House,
The Women and the Men, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, and Those Who Ride the
Night Winds. Arranged chronologically with a biographical timeline and
introduction, a new afterword from the author, title and first-line indexes,
and extensive notes to the poems, this collection is the testimony of a
life's work - from one of America's most beloved daughters and powerful
poets.
|
#5
The
MIS-Education of the Negro
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Publisher: Africa
World Press
Date Published: November 1990
Format: Trade Paper
by
Carter Godwin Woodson
Woodson's 205-page monograph, The Mis-education of tbe
Negro, reflects his profound concern for setting the record straight. His
thesis, as outlined in his Preface, could well apply today: "The so-called
modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more
good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to
the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker people." He was
concerned with the way African American identity had been warped by racist
approaches to history and education; he foresaw the ways that such a warped
history would be internalized by black students who would never know of the
achievements of their forebears, only of their humiliations and sufferings.
In the book's eighteen chapters, Woodson presents a
systematic critique of the education system and offers a plan for change
that would create a system that informs black students about their own
history and addresses their unique challenges. The current proliferation of
African American studies programs, Afrocentric schools, and multicultural
curricula all bear Woodson's stamp. Still, Mis-education remains a biting
indictment of a public school system whose promise of education of the
masses has still been left sadly unfulfilled.
—description from
Sacred Fire |
| #6
The
Ecstatic
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to order via
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by Victor
LaValle
Format:
Hardcover, 288pp.
ISBN: 0609610147
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Pub. Date: November 2002
Read an AALBC.com Review
Victor LaValle has already established himself as "one of the most
eloquent voices of the approaching century" (Kirkus Reviews), a writer of
darkly humorous tales full of haunting beauty, astonishing leaps of
imagination, and language that "crackles and hums" (Chicago Tribune). The
Ecstatic is LaValle's debut novel, a startling tale of love, horror, sex,
insanity, faith, morbid obesity, and the modern American family.
Something is wrong with Anthony—our 318-pound hero—and it's getting
worse. A monster has caught his uncle and his mother; now it wants Anthony.
Mental illness has been transmitted through his family's blood. The three
women in his life—his mother, younger sister, and grandmother—find him naked
and disoriented in his off-campus college apartment and take him home to
Queens, each determined to fix him in her own peculiar way. But his presence
soon turns their house into a semi suburban asylum.
Sweet but wickedly sarcastic, smart and heartbreakingly vulnerable,
Anthony narrates his family's surreal adventures through a world of grinning
exploitation and fake cures, from storefront evangelists and neighborhood
loan sharks to bogus beauty pageants and bootleg medical clinics. He
corresponds with a dreadlocked Japanese militant, is haunted by a vicious
pack of dogs, and tries to make his own horror movie, all in search of an
answer to a question he doesn't dare ask. Written in the tradition of misfit
picaresque from Journey to the End of the Night and Invisible Man to A
Confederacy of Dunces and The World According to Garp, The Ecstatic is the
revelatory story of a family trying to save themselves from a ravenous world
and their own unraveling minds. |
#6
 Race
Matters
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by
Dr. Cornel West
Format: Hardcover, 112pp.
ISBN: 0807009180
Publisher: Beacon Press
Pub. Date: March 1993
Read an AALBC.com
review
The scholar, theologian, and activist who has
been acclaimed as one of the most eloquent voices in our ongoing racial
debate now bridges the gulf between black and white America in a work of
enormous resonance and moral authority. West takes on the questions of
politics, economics, ethics, and spirituality and addresses the crisis in
black leadership.
Race Matters contains West's most powerful essays on the issues relevant
to black Americans today: despair, black conservatism, black-Jewish
relations, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the
black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X. And the insights that he
brings to these complicated problems remain fresh, exciting, creative, and
compassionate. Now more than ever, Race Matters is a book for all Americans,
as it helps us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new
millennium. |
| #7
Sacrifice
the One
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by Monica P.
Carter
ISBN: 0971843619
Format: Paperback, 288pp
Pub. Date: March 2004
Publisher: RootSky Publishing
Sacrifice the One is the poignant coming-of-age tale of one young woman
who struggles with the rejection of her father who blames her for his wife's
death. She does all she can to gain his acceptance and love, but seeing it
isn't coming, seeks love wherever she can find it from anyone who happens to
be well, a man.
Her craving for something so simple sends her down a dangerous path of
self destruction that not even a praying grandmother can protect her from.
Will she find the love she wants before it's too late? |
#7
The
Souls of Black Folks
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by
Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois
ISBN: 0451526031
Format: Mass Market Paperback, 278pp
Pub. Date: April 1995
Publisher: Dutton
Herein lie buried many things, which if read with patience may show the
strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century.
The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of fourteen powerfully written
essays that are by turn testimony and autobiography, stands as a monumental
achievement and quite possibly his most influential work. The book is both a
vivid portrait of the conditions facing freshly emancipated black folk at
the turn of the century and a still-relevant discussion of the dilemma of
race in the United States. It was here that Du Bois introduced his
influential concept of "double-consciousness": the struggle of black people
trying to define themselves as both black and American.
What makes these unflinching, luminous, and troublesome essays so
powerful is that each builds upon the other to try to answer questions about
race that have perplexed, enraged, and divided America for over a century.
Written in part to counter Booker T. Washington's prevailing strategy of
accommodation, The Souls of Black Folk created a fresh way of looking at and
protesting the multifaceted oppression of black people.
—description from
Sacred Fire |
| #8
The
Darkest Child: A Novel
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by
Delores Phillips
ISBN: 1569473455
Format: Hardcover, 388pp
Pub. Date: January 2004
Publisher: Soho Press, Incorporated
"Rozelle Quinn is so fair-skinned that she can pass for white. Her ten
children are mostly light, too. Everyone in the small Georgia town in which
she lives knows that they have different fathers. She favors her light
children, but it is Tangy Mae, the darkest of them all, who is the brightest
and the only one desperate to get an education. Even in rural Pakersfield
they have heard of the Supreme Court's recent ruling in the case of Brown v.
Board of Education, though they are in no hurry to comply with it." "Rozelle
wants thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae to take over her jobs: days, doing house
cleaning for whites; nights, servicing men, white and black, at the
"Farmhouse." And Rozelle is not a woman whose commands can lightly be
ignored. She is a creature of moods, possessive of all her children,
desperate for their love, demanding of utter loyalty and obedience, harshly
repressive of any signs of independence. They are the only thing in her life
that she can control." The Darkest Child shows us a world misshapen by years
of oppression in which family is powerful yet offers little kindness or
comfort. It shows us a world in which attitudes of prejudice have been
adopted by its victim, and the resulting struggle of those who are darker
complected is a struggle not only against outsiders, but against the closest
of kin. |
#8
Africana
Woman: Her Story Through Time
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or
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Cynthia Jacobs Carter, Dorothy Height
(Introduction)
ISBN:
0792261658
Format: Hardcover, 256pp
Pub. Date: November 2003
Publisher: National Geographic Society
This Unique, Profusely Illustrated, Inspiring tribute sweeps through
world history to celebrate the courage, commitment, and accomplishments that
link the daughters of Africa in a 3,500-year heritage, from ancient queens
to the modern Black women who command respect and renown in every field of
human endeavor. Now, in the first collection of its kind, Dr. Cynthia Jacobs
Carter of Howard University gathers these stories in a book that is at once
an unprecedented group portrait of Africana Woman and a stirring chronicle
of Black women's impact and influence. In these pages, meet magnificent
figures from ages past: Hatshepsut, the female Pharaoh who built some of
Egypt's greatest monuments; Makeda, the fabled Queen of Sheba, whose royal
dynasty ruled Ethiopia until the 20th century; and Nanny, Queen of the
Maroons, who led escaped slaves in forging a realm in Jamaica's wild
mountains in the 1700s. Learn also about the courageous women who escaped
from centuries of slavery, such as Coincoin, who amassed a 2,000-acre estate
in 18th-century Louisiana, and Mary Prince, author of an autobiography that
created a sensation in England in the 1830s. Trace the rise of abolitionism
and the unforgettable figures who fought for Black freedom -- Sojourner
Truth, Harriet Tubman, and others -- along with the groundbreaking leaders
who struggled to turn emancipation into true equality, a battle that lasted
over a century, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
beyond. These women -- dedicated educators like Mary Church Terrell,
business pioneers like Madam C. J. Walker, daring journalists like Ida B.
Wells-Barnett, and determined activists like Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer
-- devoted their lives to social justice. Finally, meet those who have made
modern history, from politicians like Shirley Chisholm to media stars like
Oprah Winfrey |
| #9
Thugs
and the Women Who Love Them
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by
Wahida Clark
ISBN: 0972277110
Format: Paperback, 211pp
Pub. Date: November 2002
Publisher: Black Print Publishing, Inc.
Thugs and the Women Who Love Them is the first book from
Wahida Clark, an inmate in a United States Federal prison. Clark brings us
into a world of sex, crime and brutality, all the more real because she
lived in it. Ms Clark has completed her second book,
Every Thug Needs A Lady.
|
#9
The Future of the
Race
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by
Dr. Cornel West
& Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
ISBN: 0679763783
Format: Paperback, 224pp
Pub. Date: December 1996
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
In a ground-breaking collaboration, and taking the great W. E. B. Du Bois as
their model, two of our foremost African-American intellectuals address the
dreams, fears, aspirations, and responsibilities of the black community -
especially the black elite - on the eve of the twenty-first century. In 1903,
the influential historian, editor, and co-founder of the NAACP, W. E. B. Du
Bois, published his now famous essay "The Talented Tenth." "The Negro race," it
began, "like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." For the
young post-Civil Rights era group of leaders, of which Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
and Cornel West have become such a significant part, "The Talented Tenth" was
held up as a model for the social, political, and ethical roles of the new
"crossover" generation. Du Bois's belief in an educated class dedicated to
reform became their inspiration and their credo. Now, nearly a century after Du
Bois set forth the role of the educated black American, Gates and West explore
this pivotal aspect of his intellectual legacy - and, in so doing, they not only
re-examine Du Bois's ideas on leadership but also respond to the challenges of
the present. The problems are clear and urgent. Since the day Martin Luther
King, Jr., died, the black middle class has quadrupled. Yet, simultaneously, the
size of the black underclass has disproportionately and tragically skyrocketed. |
| #10
Every
Thug Needs A Lady
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by
Wahida Clark
ISBN: 0974805114
Format: Paperback
Pub. Date: December 2003
Publisher:
Lushena
Books
|
#10
100
Amazing Facts about the Negro with Complete Proof
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order via
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by Joel Augustus
Rogers
ISBN: 0960229477
Format: Paperback, 71pp
Pub. Date: January 1989 (originally published in 1934)
Publisher: Helga Rogers
Edition Description: REVISED
Written in the 1940's and published in 1957.
BLACK FACT:
White American slave-holders used to induce white women to marry Negro
slaves in order to hold the women slaves for life.
PROOF:
In Sept. 1664, Maryland passed a law that any white woman who married a
'Negro' should serve the master of such slave "for life." Slave-holders took
advantage of this law to induce the white women, some of whom were recent
arrivals, to marry the "Negroes." MacCormac says, "Instead of preventing
such marriages this law enabled avaricious and unprincipled masters to
convert many of their (white) servants into slaves." In 1681, the
Legislature was forced to issue the following law: "Divers freeborn English
or white women sometimes by the instigation, procurement, and connivance of
their master.... and always to the satisfaction of their lascivious and
lustful desires....do intermarry with 'Negroes' and other slaves, be it
enacted that if any master....having any freeborn English or white woman
servant in their possession or property, shall by any instigation,
procurement, knowledge, permission or contrivance," cause her to marry a
slave she should be free at once and the master should pay a fine of "10,000
lbs. of tobacco." (Archives of Maryland, Vol. I, pp. 433-34; and Vol. III,
pp. 203-04, also Johns Hopkins University Studies in Hist. & Pol. Science,
No. 3 & 4.) What is true of Maryland was true of other states.
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