A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making-from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency-a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.
Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation's highest office.
Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune's Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden.
A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective-the story of one man's bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of «hope and change,» and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible.
This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama's conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.
The New York Times bestseller based on the Oscar nominated documentary film In June 1979, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin embarked on a project to tell the story of America through the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. He died before it could be completed. In his documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck imagines the book Baldwin never wrote, using his original words to create a radical, powerful and poetic work on race in the United States - then, and today. 'Thrilling . . . A portrait of one man's confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, "devastated my universe"' The New York Times 'Baldwin's voice speaks even more powerfully today . . . the prose-poet of our injustice and inhumanity . . . The times have caught up with his scalding eloquence' Variet y 'A cinematic seance . . . One of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made' Guardian ' I Am Not Your Negro turns James Baldwin into a prophet' Rolling Stone
Ranging from the age of slavery to contemporary injustices, this groundbreaking history of race, gender and class inequality by the radical political activist Angela Davis offers an alternative view of female struggles for liberation. Tracing the intertwined histories of the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, Davis examines the racism and class prejudice inherent in so much of white feminism, and in doing so brings to light new pioneering heroines, from field slaves to mill workers, who fought back and refused to accept the lives into which they were born. 'The power of her historical insights and the sweetness of her dream cannot be denied' The New York Times
An international bestseller which has sold over a million copies in the UK, Dreams From My Father is a refreshing, revealing portrait of a young man asking big questions about identity and belonging. The son of a black African father and a white American mother, President Obama recounts an emotional odyssey, retracing the migration of his mother's family from Kansas to Hawaii, then to his childhood home in Indonesia. Finally he travels to Kenya, where he confronts the bitter truth of his father's life and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST FACT CRIME SHORTLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION **SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY MARTIN SCORSESE STARRING LEONARDO DICAPRIO AND ROBERT DE NIRO** A riveting true story of greed, serial murder and racial injustice JON KRAKAUER A fiercely entertaining mystery story and a wrenching exploration of evil KATE ATKINSON A fascinating account of a tragic and forgotten chapter in the history of the American West JOHN GRISHAM From the bestselling author of The Lost City of Z , now a major film starring Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller and Robert Pattison, comes a true-life murder story which became one of the FBIs first major homicide investigations. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. As the death toll climbed , the FBI took up the case . But the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, its young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. Together with the Osage he and his undercover team began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history . David Grann has a razor-keen instinct for suspense LOUISE ERDRICH
The shocking first-hand account of one man''s remarkable fight for freedom; now an award-winning motion picture.
''Why had I not died in my young years - before God had given me children to love and live for? What unhappiness and suffering and sorrow it would have prevented. I sighed for liberty; but the bondsman''s chain was round me, and could not be shaken off.'' 1841: Solomon Northup is a successful violinist when he is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Taken from his family in New York State - with no hope of ever seeing them again - and forced to work on the cotton plantations in the Deep South, he spends the next twelve years in captivity until his eventual escape in 1853.
First published in 1853, this extraordinary true story proved to be a powerful voice in the debate over slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. It is a true-life testament of one man''s courage and conviction in the face of unfathomable injustice and brutality: its influence on the course of American history cannot be overstated.
With a new introduction by Anthony Arnove, this updated edition of the classic national bestseller reviews the book's thirty-five year history and demonstrates once again why it is a significant contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history. Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools-with its emphasis on great men in high places-to focus on the street, the home, and the, workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's Historyof the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of-and in the words of-America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles-the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality-were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term,A People's History of the United States, which was nominated for the American Book Award in 1981, features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.
A former slave and one of the most powerful orators of her time, Sojourner Truth fought for the equal rights of black women throughout her life. This selection of her impassioned speeches is accompanied by the words of other inspiring African-American female campaigners from the nineteenth century. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
'Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival' Advocating love as strength and non-violence as the most powerful weapon there is, these sermons and writings from the heart of the civil rights movement show Martin Luther King's rhetorical power at its most fiery and uplifting. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.
Chronicles the American West from 1860-1890. The book tells the stories of such famous Red Indian warriors and tribal chieftains as Sitting Bull, Cochise, Crazy Horse and Geronimo.
**WINNER of the National Book Awards (Nonfiction)**br>New Books to Watch Out for in October, New York Timesbr>Best New Books to Read in October, TIMEbr>Best Books of Fall 2020, O, the Oprah Magazinebr>br>A landmark biography of one of the twentieth century''s most compelling figures,rewriting much of the known narrative.br>br>Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X - including siblings, classmates, friends, cellmates, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become hundreds of hours of interviews into a portrait that would separate fact from fiction.br>br>The result is this magisterial work that conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist, whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his followers stir with purpose to overcome the obstacles of racism. Setting his life not only within the political struggles of his day but also against the larger backdrop of American history, this remarkable masterpiece traces his path from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.br>br>An author who saw Malcolm X speak and could not stand the phrase ''we may never know'', Payne writes cinematically from start to finish and delivers extraordinary revelations - from a hair-raising scene of Malcolm''s clandestine meeting with the KKK, to a minute-by-minute account of his murder in Harlem in 1965, in which he makes the case for the complicity of the American government.br>br>Introduced by Payne''s daughter and primary researcher, Tamara Payne, who, following her father''s death, heroically completed the biography, The Dead Are Arising is a penetrating and riveting work that affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle and the story of the twentieth century.>
The most compelling biography I have read in years . . . There has been a host of JFK biographies, but this one excels for its narrative drive, fine judgments and meticulous research . . . makes the story seem a cliffhanger even though we know what is coming'' Max Hastings, Sunday Timesbr>br>''In his utterly absorbingJFK, Fred Logevall reconstructs not only a great man, but also his entire age'' Brendan Simms, author of Hitler: A Global Biographybr>br>The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian takes us as close as we have ever been to the real John F. Kennedy in this revelatory biography of the iconic, yet still elusive, thirty-fifth president.br>________________br>br>By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen. Born in 1917 to a striving Irish American family that had become among Boston''s wealthiest, Kennedy knew political ambition from an early age, and his meteoric rise to become the youngest elected president cemented his status as one of the most mythologized figures in modern history.br>br>Beckoned by this gap in our historical knowledge, Harvard professor Fredrik Logevall has spent much of the last decade combing through material unseen or unused by previous biographers, searching for and piecing together the ''real'' John F. Kennedy -- resulting in a masterpiece that reviews have agreed will be the definitive work. This first volume of this sweeping two-part biography spans the first thirty-nine years of his life, revealing his early relationships, his formative and heroic experiences during World War II, and his deeply fascinating romance with Jackie Kennedy. In examining these pre-White House years, Logevall chronicles Kennedy''s extraordinary life and times with authority and novelistic sensibility, putting the reader in every room where it happened. This landmark work offers the clearest portrait we have of a remarkable figure who still inspires individuals around the world.br>________________br>br>''A riveting study of young JFK. Logevall has written a superb book.'' David Runciman, Guardian br>br>''A brisk, authoritative, and candid biography, and a wonderfully compelling history of America''s heady and troubled mid-century rise'' Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United Statesbr>br>''[Fredrik Logevall] makes JFK as alive and compelling as if you were reading about him for the first time'' George Packer, author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New Americabr>br>''A powerful, provocative, and above all compelling book'' Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of The Soul of Americabr>br>''In this first volume of Fredrik Logevall''s definitive biography, JFK is all too engagingly and amiably human . . . I hope Logevall''s second volume will follow soon'' Peter Conrad, Observer>
Wry, readable and often astonishing ... nimbly combines breadth and sweep with fine-grained attention to detail. The result is a provocative and absorbing history of the United States' NEW YORK TIMES For a country that has always denied having dreams of empire, the United States owns a lot of overseas territory.
America has always prided itself on being a champion of sovereignty and independence. We know it has spread its money, language and culture across the world - but we still think of it as a contained territory, framed by Canada above, Mexico below, and oceans either side. Nothing could be further from the truth.
How to Hide an Empire tells the story of the United States outside the United States - from nineteenth-century conquests like Alaska, Hawai'i, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, to the catalogue of islands, archipelagos and military bases dotted around the globe over which the Stars and Stripes flies. Many are thousands of miles from the mainland; all are central to its history.
But the populations of these territories, despite being subject to America's government, cannot vote for it; they have often fought America's wars, but they do not enjoy the rights of full citizens. These forgotten episodes cast American history, and its present, in a revealing new light. The birth control pill, chemotherapy, plastic, Godzilla, the Beatles, the name America itself - you can't understand the histories of any of thesewithout understanding territorial empire.
Full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalisation mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.
B>A moving family biography in which the poet traces her family history back through Jim Crow, the slave trade, and all the way to the women of the Dahomey people in West Africa. /b>br>br>Buffalo, New York. A fathers funeral. Memory. br>br>In Generations, Lucille Cliftons formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, born among the Dahomey people in 1822, who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a carpetbagger and the authors grandmother. br>br>Clifton tells us about the life of an African American family through slavery and hard times and beyond, the death of her father and grandmother, but also all the life and love and triumph that came before and remains even now. br>br>Generations is a powerful work of determination and affirmation. I look at my husband, Clifton writes, and my children and I feel the Dahomey women gathering in my bones.
This deft consideration of seemingly irreconcilable values, between the personal and private dimensions of performance, can be found throughout the essays in A Little Devil in America...Abdurraqib sees performance as a site of radical questioning, experimentation, and dream-making. This book is not a work of theory. It is sensual. We watch him watching his idols and we watch him dancing along with them, sometimes clumsily. If Brooks''s goal is to make a case for performers'' intellectualism, Abdurraqib''s is to help us understand how they teach us to live richer, more embodied lives>
Réalisé à partir d'archives privées et mettant en avant des oeuvres contemporaines d'artistes qui revendiquent l'influence de l'expérience et de la politique d'Angela Davis, ce livre fournit un récit convaincant de son parcours à travers les jonctions de la race et du genre d'un point de vue politique et économique. Commençant en 1970 avec son arrestation, puis en passant par son procès et son acquittement, le livre retrace la vie et le travail de l'activiste au cours des décennies suivantes et sa carrière influente d'intellectuelle publique. Abondamment illustré avec des documents trouvés dans les archives, y compris des articles de presse, des photographies, des croquis de cour, des vidéos, de la musique, des écrits, de la correspondance et des écrits politiques d'Angela Davis, le livre comprend également des entretiens avec Angela Davis et Lisbet Tellefsen, l'archiviste qui a rassemblé et agencé tout ce matériel.
B>Featuring interveiws of civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis at almost every stage of his career, this collection illustrates why Lewis has become a human rights icon and remains an inspiration to activists today/b>br>br>Throughout John Lewiss long and storied career he maintained a seemingly unwavering hope for a better future. This hope can be traced throughout the inteviews collected here. From a young activist testifying in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday to recounting the violence he met as a Freedom Rider to an elder statesman inspired by today''s civil rights activists, this collection forms a portrait of a man whose life was spent fighting for a better world and never lost hope.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM TA-NEHISI COATES, AUTHOR OF THE WATER DANCER A riveting collection of the hardships, hairbreadth escapes, and mortal struggles of enslaved people seeking freedom: These are the true stories of the Underground Railroad. A secret network of safe houses, committees and guides that stretched well below the Mason-Dixon Line into the brutal slave states of the American South, the Underground Railroad remains one of the most impressive and well-organised resistance movements in modern history. It facilitated the escape of over 30,000 slave ''passengers'' through America and into Canada during its peak years of 1850-60, and, in total, an estimated 100,000 slaves found their freedom through the network. Abridged from William Still''s The Underground Railroad Records - an epic historical document that chronicles the first-hand stories of American slaves who escaped to freedom via the Underground Railroad - Passengers tells of the secret methods, risks and covert sacrifices that were made to liberate so many from slavery. From tales of men murdered in cold blood for their part in helping assist runaways and terrifyingly tense descriptions of stowaways and dramatic escape plans, to stories of families reunited and the moments of absurdity that the Underground Railroad forced its ''passengers'' to sometimes endure, Still''s narratives testify to the humanity of this vast enterprise. ABRIDGED FROM WILLIAM STILL''S THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD RECORDS
B>Acclaimed author and historian Mark K. Updegrove, head of the LBJ Foundation and presidential historian for ABC News, offers an illuminating account of John F. Kennedys brief but transformative tenure in the White House./b>br> br> Nearly sixty years after his death, JFK still holds an outsize place in the American imagination. While Baby Boomers remember his dazzling presence as president, millennials more likely know him from advertisements for Omega watches or Ray Ban sunglasses. Yet his years in office were marked by more than his style and elegance. His presidency is a story of a fledgling leader forced to meet unprecedented challenges, and to rise above missteps to lead his nation into a new and hopeful era.br> br> Kennedy entered office inexperienced but alluring, his reputation more given by an enamored public than earned through achievement. In this gripping new assessment of his time in the Oval Office, Updegrove reveals how JFKs first months were marred by setbacks: the botched Bay of Pigs invasions, a disastrous summit with the Soviet premier, and a mismanaged approach to the Civil Rights movement. But the young president soon proved that behind the glamour was a leader of uncommon fortitude and vision. br> br> A humbled Kennedy conceded his mistakes, and, importantly for our times, drew important lessons from his failures that he used to right wrongs and move forward undaunted. Indeed, Kennedy grew as president, radiating greater possibility as he coolly faced a steady stream of crises before his tragic end.br> br> Incomparable Grace compellingly reexamines the dramatic, consequential White House years of a flawed but gifted leader too often defined by the Camelot myth that came after his untimely death.
The most famous autobiography written by a nineteenth-century African American woman, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a triumph of American literature and the unflinching narrative that broke the silence on the psychosexual exploitation of African-American women "I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away." In clear and unshrinking prose, Harriet Jacobs--writing under the pseudonym of "Linda Brent"--relates the story of her girlhood and adolescence as a slave in North Carolina and her eventual escape: a bildungsroman set in the complex terrain of a chauvinist, white-supremacist society. Resolutely addressing women readers, rather than men, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl sought to make white women understand the ways that the threat of sexual violence shaped the lives of enslaved black women and children.
