13 Books Published by Three Rivers Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about All The Rage: The Boondocks Past And Present by Aaron McGruder All The Rage: The Boondocks Past And Present

by Aaron McGruder
Three Rivers Press (Oct 30, 2007)
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Here are the latest, greatest, and last of the daily and Sunday strips; banned comics that have never been seen before, with Aaron McGruder’s commentary on them; and interviews and profiles of the man behind the rage. All the Rage is a must for any true Boondocks fan.


Click for more detail about Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography by Gordon Parks Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography

by Gordon Parks
Three Rivers Press (Sep 20, 2005)
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Alone after his mother’s death, homeless in a Minnesota winter, young Gordon struggled to stay in school, working at menial jobs and riding streetcars all night to escape the cold. Refusing to succumb to despair, he instead transformed his anger at poverty and racism into a creative force and went on to break down one barrier after another. He was the first black photographer at Vogue and Life, and the first black screenwriter and director in Hollywood, at the helm of such projects as the award-winning Shaft. And his novel, The Learning Tree, has sold more than a quarter of a million copies.

Spanning the major events of five decades, Voices in the Mirror takes readers from Minnesota and Washington, D.C., to the glamour of Paris and the ghettos of Rio and Harlem. His intimate portrayals of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini; of the Muslim and African American icons Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and Muhammad Ali; of the young militants of the civil rights and black power movements; and of the tragic experiences of the less famous, like the Brazilian youngster Flavio, combine to form an unforgettable story.

Gordon Parks’s life is a metaphor for the courageous vision and extraordinary resilience of the African American community, while also serving as a testament to the spirit and generosity that are its hallmarks.


Click for more detail about Public Enemy #2: An All-New Boondocks Collection by Aaron McGruder Public Enemy #2: An All-New Boondocks Collection

by Aaron McGruder
Three Rivers Press (Apr 26, 2005)
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Here’s the next big collection of Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks, the most subversively funny, controversial, and politically engaged strip to be found in America’s comics pages. Featuring Huey Freeman, a radical preteen conspiracy theorist, and his little brother Riley, a desperately cute thug-in-training, The Boondocks skewers targets from George W. Bush and Ralph Nader to Queen Latifah and Bill Cosby. With more than 500 previously uncollected strips—including strips banned from newspapers around the country—Public Enemy #2 is a must-have collection of the sharpest satire being crafted today.


Click for more detail about A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury by Aaron McGruder A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury

by Aaron McGruder
Three Rivers Press (Sep 23, 2003)
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Here’s the first big book of The Boondocks, more than four years and 800 strips of one of the most influential, controversial, and scathingly funny comics ever to run in a daily newspaper.

“With bodacious wit, in just a few panels, each day Aaron serves up—and sends up—life in America through the eyes of two African-American kids who are full of attitude, intelligence, and rebellion. Each time I read the strip, I laugh—and I wonder how long The Boondocks can get away with the things it says. And how on earth can the most truthful thing in the newspaper be the comics?”
—From the foreword by Michael Moore


Click for more detail about Who’s Gonna Take the Weight:  Manhood, Race, and Power in America by Kevin Powell Who’s Gonna Take the Weight: Manhood, Race, and Power in America

by Kevin Powell
Three Rivers Press (Aug 19, 2003)
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“A mighty wind of fresh air. His pitiless self-examination—and his equally honest exploration of the racial, sexual, cultural, and class fault lines that thread our psychic and social landscape—is not only brave but necessary if our nation is to survive.”
—Michael Eric Dyson

“Kevin Powell is pushing to bring, as he has so brilliantly done before, the voices of his generation: the concerns, the cares, the fears, and the fearlessness.”
—Nikki Giovanni

In three mind-jolting essays by one of the most passionate and eloquent voices of his generation, Who’s Gonna Take the Weight? by Kevin Powell leads us to the heart of the searing issues facing us today, from manhood, violence, and gender oppression to celebrity culture and hip-hop. Using compelling personal stories as the connecting thread, he examines what this nation has become since the monumental upheavals of the 1960s and where it might be headed if we’re not careful.

Written one hundred years after W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk and forty years after James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Who’s Gonna Take the Weight? is an impassioned witness to the burning problems that have accompanied us on our journey through the twenty-first century.


Click for more detail about Life And Def: Sex, Drugs, Money, + God by Russell Simmons Life And Def: Sex, Drugs, Money, + God

by Russell Simmons
Three Rivers Press (Sep 24, 2002)
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Russell Simmons, the original and eternal hip-hop mogul, is one of the most innovative and influential figures in modern American business and culture. When no one outside of inner-city New York had even heard of hip-hop, Simmons saw the seeds of a global force that would change the way people talk, dress, listen to music, and choose the heroes they hang on their walls. Today, he oversees a sprawling, multimillion-dollar empire of culture-defining businesses in everything from music to fashion, advertising to film, and media to visual art. At the same time he’s broadened his interests and influence and pushed hip-hop to new plateaus of power and relevance. Life and Def is a one-of-a-kind tale that interweaves the remarkable journey of Russell Simmons with the story of the culture he’s transformed and been transformed by.

In his own brash, compelling voice, Simmons chronicles his numerous business successes and occasional failures. He tells the story of the founding of the legendary Def Jam Records, whose roster stretches from original rap icons like L.L. Cool J, Public Enemy, and the Beastie Boys to today’s top stars, including Jay-Z and DMX. He traces the launching of Def Comedy Jam, the long-running hit television series that introduced a new generation of black comedic stars to America, from Martin Lawrence and Bill Bellamy to Bernie Mac and Chris Rock. He spins hilarious tales of his adventures in Hollywood, where he’s produced hit movies like Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor and worked with quirky geniuses like Abel Ferrara. He also tells the story of Phat Farm, the wildly successful pioneering urban clothing label whose origins lay in Russell’s longtime fascination with fashion (and fashion models).

Simmons’s story is also one of personal transformation, from the driven man who in the heady days of early success indulged himself with drugs, sex, and world-class decadence to the husband and father he is today, a man who has found meaning in activism, philanthropy, and spiritual practice while never losing his passion for the social, political, artistic, and commercial potential of hip-hop.

Through it all he relates telling anecdotes about the characters he’s dealt with: models and gangsters, street poets and gurus, and major players like Donald Trump, Sean Combs, Jon Peters, and Tupac Shakur. Full of advice, opinions, and behind-the-scenes scoop, Life and Def is the story of the quintessential hip-hop life.


From the Hardcover edition.


Click for more detail about Spirit Dive: An African-American’s Journey to Uncover a Sunken Slave Ship’s Past (Pbk) by Michael H. Cottman Spirit Dive: An African-American’s Journey to Uncover a Sunken Slave Ship’s Past (Pbk)

by Michael H. Cottman
Three Rivers Press (Dec 28, 1999)
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When prize-winning journalist and avid scuba diver Michael Cottman participated in an underwater expedition to survey the sunken wreck of a slave ship off the coast of Florida, he was overwhelmed by powerful feelings of kinship and oneness with his African ancestors. As he held in his hands the very shackles that had bound hundreds of men, women, and children in their tortured passage from their African homeland to America, Michael Cottman became determined to tell their stories and the story behind the ship that had carried them away from all they knew and loved.
Spirit Dive takes readers back three centuries and to three continents in order to trace the complex and moving story of the slaves and the slavers. We travel to England on the trail of the shipbuilders and the captain and his crew; to Goree Island, located off the westernmost extension of the African continent near Dakar, where the ship almost certainly docked and from which its enslaved passengers would have gotten their last view of their homeland; and to the Caribbean, where the Henrietta Marie sank without a trace—until its recent rediscovery gave us a tangible key to one of history’s most terrible episodes.
Spirit Dive is a powerful and compelling testament of one man’s attempt to make sense of the history of his ancestors, chronicling his journey while confronting questions with no answers and striving for reconciliation with his homeland’s past and his own country’s future.


Click for more detail about Best Seat in the House: A Basketball Memoir by Spike Lee Best Seat in the House: A Basketball Memoir

by Spike Lee
Three Rivers Press (May 19, 1998)
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Best Seat in the House, Spike Lee’s evocative and compelling basketball memoir, interweaves several journeys over a course of thirty years. The first is professional basketball’s metamorphosis from a fringe sport to the big-money spectacle it is today, filled with outrageously inflated salaries and egos. The other journey is that of Shelton Jackson Lee himself, who has gone from a skinny kid playing ball on the streets of Brooklyn, sneaking into Madison Square Garden to watch his beloved Knicks, to a student at Morehouse College and NYU film school, to a world-renowned film director and hoops fan.

Along the way Spike takes readers on entertaining and provocative detours, including a one-on-one with that other Brooklyn-born, film-directing, Garden-inhabiting hoops fan, Woody Allen; reviews of sports movies (Spike has seen them all, and the results aren’t pretty); an unusually candid interview with Michael Jordan; and a stark assessment of the role of African-American athletes—both in the big business of sports and in the broader culture.

But overall, Best Seat in the House is a love letter, from a passionate and unswervingly devoted fan, to the game and the team that took possession of Spike’s adolescent heart—the New York Knickerbockers—and held it without a turnover through thirty years. of bang-ups and fouls, bad calls and air balls.
Best Seat in the House is a slam dunk.


Click for more detail about 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History by Jeffrey C. Stewart 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History

by Jeffrey C. Stewart
Three Rivers Press (May 04, 1998)
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Where can one go to get a comprehensive and entertaining account of the most significant events, individuals and social processes of African-American history? Fear not, because 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African-American History is history at your fingertips-in a concise, accessible, easily-read format.

Jeffrey C. Stewart, Associate Professor of History at George Mason University, takes the reader on an all-encompassing journey through the entirety of African-American history that is pithy, provocative, and encyclopedic in scope. Here are all the people, terms, ideas, events, and social processes that make African-American history such a fascinating and inspiring subject.

1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African-American History covers all the significant information in six broad sections: Great Migrations; Civil Rights and Politics; Science, Inventions and Medicine; Sports; Military; Culture and Religion. It will entertain as well as instruct, and it can be read from beginning to end as well as opened at random and read at any length without confusion.

A necessary addition to every family’s library, 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African-American History presents African American history in a fun, engaging and intelligent way.


Click for more detail about The Family of Black America by Michael H. Cottman The Family of Black America

by Michael H. Cottman
Three Rivers Press (Sep 09, 1996)
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Collects photographs by noted Black photographers which trace the history of the Black American family in the twentieth century, and celebrates the renewed commitment to family displayed at the Million Man March.


Family of Black America 6c.Counter

by Michael H. Cottman
Three Rivers Press (Sep 09, 1996)
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Click for more detail about Million Man March by Michael H. Cottman Million Man March

by Michael H. Cottman
Three Rivers Press (Dec 19, 1995)
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Click for more detail about Bring The Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture by Havelock Nelson and Michael A. Gonzales Bring The Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture

by Havelock Nelson and Michael A. Gonzales
Three Rivers Press (Nov 05, 1991)
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A guide to rap and hip-hop music examines the origins of the musical form and discusses influential performers as well as the best recordings available.