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Coming of Age in Mississippi
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Anne Moody

ISBN: 0385337817
Format: Paperback, 416pp
Pub. Date: February 3, 2004

Coming of Age in Mississippi
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Anne Moody

ISBN: 0440314887
Format: Mass Market Paperback, 384pp
Pub. Date: November 1975

Written without a trace of sentimentality or apology, this is an unforgettable personal story � the truth as a remarkable young woman named Anne Moody lived it. To read her book is to know what it is to have grown up black in Mississippi in the forties an fifties � and to have survived with pride and courage intact.

In this now classic autobiography, she details the sights, smells, and suffering of growing up in a racist society and candidly reveals the soul of a black girl who had the courage to challenge it. The result is a touchstone work: an accurate, authoritative portrait of black family life in the rural South and a moving account of a woman's indomitable heart.

 

 

Friday Night at Honeybee's
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Andrea Smith

ISBN: 0385336985
Format: Paperback, 320pp
Pub. Date: February 3, 2004

"Everyone who's anyone in the Harlem music scene has heard of Honeybee McColor and the famous Friday night gathers that fill her brownstone to bursting. In the early 1960s, nowhere but "The Big House" attracts so many renowned jazz and blues musicians - and no one but Miss Honeybee attracts such talented lost souls as Forestine Bent and Viola Bembrey." The two women come from opposite worlds: one from the Brooklyn projects, the other from the Baptist, rural South. Both know that they belong elsewhere. A rare and extraordinary singer, Forestine aims to be a star. And Viola, stifled by her religious upbringing, strains to find freedom. But Forestine's single-mindedness endangers the one person she really loves, while Viola blindly finds comfort in a man whose wild ways threaten to consume her. With the help of Miss Honeybee and her remarkable friends - Willa, known for her talent both in the kitchen and on the piano, and the outrageous Vernon, who looks more elegant in a gown than any woman - Forestine and Viola struggle to find the balancing point where music doesn't overpower love.

 

 

Dr. Ro's Ten Secrets to Livin' Healthy: America's Most Renowned African American Nutritionist Shows You How to Look Great, Feel Better, and Live Longer by Eating Right
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Rovenia Brock Ph.D.

ISBN: 0553802984
Format: Hardcover, 336pp
Pub. Date: December 30, 2003

In this one-of-a-kind book, Dr. Rovenia M. Brock - known as Dr. Ro� to fans of Black Entertainment Television's Heart & Soul - reveals practical, satisfying ways for African American women to eat healthy, get fit, and overcome weight problems and the health risks that accompany them.
From the "Big Ten" myths about miracle weight-loss diets to how eating the right foods can help you live longer and why soul food (if prepared properly) really can be good for you, Dr. Ro shows how many serious illnesses can be largely prevented - and even reversed. And you don't need Oprah's salary to do it. Using her own inspiring story and those of many other women as well, Dr. Ro discusses the health, fitness, and even cultural issues that are unique to black women, and outlines a diet and nutrition program to fit every lifestyle.

Rovenia M. Brock, Ph.D., has been a practicing nutritionist for over twenty years and was the host of Black Entertainment Television's Heart & Soul. She is an award-winning lecturer and health reporter, a resident nutrition expert to bet.com, and currently appears on WHUR_FM radio with her own health segment, "Heads Up on Health with Dr. Ro." She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Dr. Murray Riggins, and their beloved cocker spaniel, Destinye.
 

 

 

Washington and Caesar
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Christian Cameron

ISBN: 0385337760
Format: Hardcover, 592pp
Pub. Date: December 30, 2003

Inspired by a little-known historical fact - that American slaves fought alongside the British in the Revolutionary War - this epic novel tells of a Mount Vernon slave who joins a Loyalist black regiment charged with defeating his former master on the battlefield.

The year is 1773. A new slave arrives at George Washington's Virginia estate and is given the name Caesar. But the war for independence will soon bring a turn of events neither master nor slave could have predicted. Within months they will be fighting on opposite sides: Washington as commander of the Continental Army, Caesar as a soldier in the legendary Loyalist corps made up of former slaves. In this captivating tour de force brimming with spectacular battle scenes and gripping historical detail, Caesar's perilous rise through the British ranks is deftly interwoven with the story of Washington's war years, leading to the day when they come face-to-face again - this time in uniform.
A former naval officer, Christian Cameron is a military historian and leader of one of the most authentic Revolutionary reenactment units in the United States. He lives in Baltimore, MD.

 

 

Please Please Please
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Renee Swindle

ISBN: 0440223768
Format: Mass Market Paperback, 336pp
Pub. Date: June 2000

Babysister's got a secret - the tall, well-dressed, and gorgeous Darren Forrest Wilson. For week after glorious week, Babysister hides her love affair from everyone she knows: her doting father, who's spoiled her since she was a child; her resentful older brother, Malcolm; her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Rob; her gossiping co-workers at the bank; her spitfire friend, Lisette (a self-described "goddess of color" from New York); and especially her best friend, Deborah, who just happens to be the woman Darren was dating before Babysister stole him away.. "What starts out as lust, though, quickly turns into the real thing for Babysister, and her life feels complete - until Darren begins to have regrets about Deborah. Pure, church-going, and beautiful, Deborah is clearly the marrying kind, and soon the tables are turned. When wedding bells ring, Deborah's the blushing bride and Babysister's out in the cold - until, of course, Darren returns, begging forgiveness. With the love of her life on her doorstep, Babysister is torn between the two halves of her broken heart - the one that desperately wants him back, and the one that's just beginning to wise up.

 

 

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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Maya Angelou

ISBN: 055338001X
Format: Paperback, 290pp
Pub. Date: May 1997

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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Maya Angelou

ISBN: 0553279378
Format: Mass Market Paperback, 289pp
Pub. Date: May 1983

"This testimony from a black sister marks the beginning of a new error in the minds and hearts of all black men and women...I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such a moving wonder, such a luminous dignity. I have no words for this achievement, but I know that not since the days of my childhood when the people in books were more real than the people one saw everyday, had I found myself so moved...Her portrait is a biblical study of life in the midst of death."
 � James Baldwin

 

 

Go Tell It on the Mountain
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James Baldwin

ISBN: 0385334575
Format: Paperback, 240pp
Pub. Date: June 2000

Go Tell It on the Mountain
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James Baldwin

ISBN: 0440330076
Format: Mass Market Paperback, 221pp
Pub. Date: May 1976

"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."

Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

 

 

Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years
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A. Elizabeth & Sarah Delany, Amy Hill Hearth,

ISBN: 0385312520
Format: Paperback, 239pp
Pub. Date: January 1997

Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years
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A. Elizabeth & Sarah Delany, Amy Hill Hearth

ISBN: 0440220424
Format: Mass Market Paperback, 299pp
Pub. Date: September 1994

In their 200+ combined years, Sadie and Bessie Delany have seen it all. They saw their father, who was born into slavery, become America's first black Episcopal bishop. They saw their mother�a woman of mixed racial parentage who was born free�give birth to ten children, all of whom would become college-educated, successful professionals in a time when blacks could scarcely expect to receive a high school diploma. They saw the post-Reconstruction South, the Jim Crow laws, Harlem's Golden Age, and the Civil Rights movement�and, in their own feisty, wise, inimitable way, they've got a lot to say about it.

More than a firsthand account of black American history, Having Our Say teaches us about surviving, thriving, and embracing life, no matter what obstacles are in our way.

 

 

Soul on Ice
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Eldridge Cleaver

ISBN: 038533379X
Format: Paperback, 256pp
Pub. Date: March 1999

The now-classic memoir that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the civil rights movement and the black experience.

By turns shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw, the searingly honest memoirs of Eldridge Cleaver are a testament to his unique place in American history. Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this now classic autobiography, is how much he was a man.

 

 

Barbara Jordan: American Hero
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Mary Beth Rogers

ISBN: 0553380664
Format: Paperback, 432pp
Pub. Date: January 2000

The first African-American to serve in the Texas Senate since Reconstruction, Barbara Jordan was also the first black woman elected to Congress from the South, and the first to deliver the keynote address at a national party convention. Her powerful oratory stirred a nation; her ideals of ethical leadership inspired millions. Yet Jordan herself remained a mystery, a woman so private that even her close friends did not know the name of the illness that debilitated her for two decades until it struck her down at the age of fifty-nine. Mary Beth Rogers first met Barbara Jordan in the 1960s, and their paths crossed over the years as they pursued their academic and political careers. Now Rogers's meticulously documented biography deftly combines personal insight and impeccable research to explore the forces that shaped the moral character and quiet dignity of this extraordinary woman. Examining Jordan's stark childhood as the daughter of a Baptist preacher in sharply segregated Houston, Rogers reveals the seeds of her trademark stoicism and recaptures the essence of a black woman entering politics as the civil rights movement exploded across the nation. Jordan's political career went on to be both groundbreaking and inspiring.