http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell
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.
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![]() Click to order via Amazon or Barnes and Noble Andrea Smith ISBN:
0385336985 "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.
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![]() Click to order via Amazon or Barnes and Noble Rovenia Brock Ph.D.
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.
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![]() Click to order via Amazon or Barnes and Noble Christian Cameron
ISBN: 0385337760
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.
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![]() Click to order via Amazon or Barnes and Noble Renee Swindle
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.
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"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."
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"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.
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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.
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![]() Click to order via Amazon or Barnes and Noble Eldridge Cleaver
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.
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![]() Click to order via Amazon or Barnes and Noble Mary Beth Rogers
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.
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