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  What Truth Sounds Like - Robert...

  Michael Eric Dyson

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  This program is read by the author.What Truth Sounds Like is a timely exploration of America's tortured racial politics that continues the conversation from Michael Eric Dyson's New York Times bestseller Tears We Cannot Stop.President Barack Obama: "Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison.”In 2015 BLM activist Julius Jones confronted Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with an urgent query: “What in your heart has changed that’s going to change the direction of this country?” “I don’t believe you just change hearts,” she protested. “I believe you change laws.”The fraught conflict between conscience and politics – between morality and power – in addressing race hardly began with Clinton. An electrifying and traumatic encounter in the sixties crystallized these furious disputes.In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and a valiant activist, Jerome Smith. It was Smith’s relentless, unfiltered fury that set Kennedy on his heels, reducing him to sullen silence.Kennedy walked away from the nearly three-hour meeting angry – that the black folk assembled didn’t understand politics, and that they weren’t as easy to talk to as Martin Luther King. But especially that they were more interested in witness than policy. But Kennedy’s anger quickly gave way to empathy, especially for Smith. “I guess if I were in his shoes…I might feel differently about this country.” Kennedy set about changing policy – the meeting having transformed his thinking in fundamental ways.There was more: every big argument about race that persists to this day got a hearing in that room. Smith declaring that he’d never fight for his country given its racist tendencies, and Kennedy being appalled at such lack of patriotism, tracks the disdain for black dissent in our own time. His belief that black folk were ungrateful for the Kennedys’ efforts to make things better shows up in our day as the charge that black folk wallow in the politics of ingratitude and victimhood. The contributions of black queer folk to racial progress still cause a stir. BLM has been accused of harboring a covert queer agenda. The immigrant experience, like that of Kennedy – versus the racial experience of Baldwin – is a cudgel to excoriate black folk for lacking hustle and ingenuity. The questioning of whether folk who are interracially partnered can authentically communicate black interests persists. And we grapple still with the responsibility of black intellectuals and artists to bring about social change.What Truth Sounds Like exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy – of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape. The future of race and democracy hang in the balance. More praise for What Truth Sounds Like: "Dyson's passion for the rich African-American cultural tapestry reverberates in this audiobook." — AudioFile Magazine“What Truth Sounds Like is a tour de force of intellectual history and cultural analysis, a poetically written work that calls on all of us to get back in that room and to resolve the racial crises we confronted more than fifty years ago.” —Harry Belafonte

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  Memories of an SOE Historian

  M. R. D. Foot

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  The historian of the British World War II intelligence organization chronicles his life and service career in this memoir. 
   
  Michael (M.R.D.) Foot enjoys the rare distinction of being the only person referred to by his real name in a John Le Carré novel. A highly significant tribute to the man entrusted with writing the official record of the Special Operations Executive. He authored first (1966) the History of SOE in France and twenty years later the highly sensitive accounts of SOE operations in Belgium and Holland (which the Germans infiltrated with disastrous results). With his own war service background and academic reputation M.R.D. was an inspired choice for these historic tasks. He was fearless in pursuit of the truth and in thwarting bureaucratic attempts to muzzle him. His war exploits make thrilling reading. His behind-the-lines mission to track down a notorious SD interrogator went badly wrong, and he only just escaped with his life. His career has brought him into close contact with an astonishing cast of characters, and his tongue-in-cheek account of academic life makes lively reading.

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  Being Lolita - A Memoir

  Alisson Wood

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  This program is read by the author.A dark romance evolves between a high schooler and her English teacher in this breathtakingly powerful memoir about a young woman who must learn to rewrite her own story.“Have you ever read Lolita?”So begins seventeen-year-old Alisson’s metamorphosis from student to lover and then victim. A lonely and vulnerable high school senior, Alisson finds solace only in her writing—and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North.Mr. North gives Alisson a copy of Lolita to read, telling her it is a beautiful story about love. The book soon becomes the backdrop to a connection that blooms from a simple crush into a forbidden romance. But as Mr. North’s hold on her tightens, Alisson is forced to evaluate how much of their narrative is actually a disturbing fiction.In the wake of what becomes a deeply abusive relationship, Alisson is faced again and again with the story of her past, from rereading Lolita in college to working with teenage girls to becoming a professor of creative writing. It is only with that distance and perspective that she understands the ultimate power language has had on her—and how to harness that power to tell her own true story.Being Lolita is a stunning coming-of-age memoir that shines a bright light on our shifting perceptions of consent, vulnerability, and power. This is the story of what happens when a young woman realizes her entire narrative must be rewritten—and then takes back the pen to rewrite it.  A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books  "Being Lolita is an unflinching depiction of grooming and a searing indictment of exploitative teachers, but most of all it’s an act of redemption—a powerful realization of Wood’s vow 'to do the little I can to make sure what happened to me doesn’t happen again.'"— Susan Choi, author of the National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise"Wood reminds us that stories still have the power to change the world. This is a fascinating story of survival and purpose, yet it is also a story of interpretation. How we read the world changes how we live in it. A fantastic debut." — Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased

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  The Giant of the French...

  David Lawday

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  A biography of Georges-Jacques Danton, a leading French revolutionary—from his rural upbringing to his death five years after the storming of the Bastille.   One of the Western world’s most epic uprisings, the French Revolution ended a monarchy that had ruled for almost a thousand years. Georges-Jacques Danton was the driving force behind it. Now David Lawday, author of Napoleon’s Master, reveals the larger-than-life figure who joined the fray at the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and was dead five years later.   To hear Danton speak, his booming voice a roll of thunder, excited bourgeois reformers and the street alike; his impassioned speeches, often hours long, drove the sans-culottes to action and kept the Revolution alive. But as the newly appointed Minister of Justice, Danton struggled to steer the increasingly divided Revolutionary government. Working tirelessly to halt the bloodshed of Robespierre’s terror, he ultimately became another of its victims. True to form, Danton did not go easily to the guillotine; at his trial, he defended himself with such vehemence that the tribunal convicted him before he could rally the crowd in his favor.   In vivid, almost novelistic prose, Lawday leads us from Danton’s humble roots to the streets of revolutionary Paris, where this political legend acted on the stage of the revolution that altered Western civilization.   “A gripping story, beautifully told . . . Danton was a headstrong firebrand, a swashbuckling political showman with a prodigious memory, whose spectacular oratory held audiences in thrall.” —The Economist

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  Edgar Allan Poe and HP...

  Charles River Editors

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  Edgar Allan Poe was one of America’s first native-born professional authors, but he nevertheless embodied the now-common archetype of the artist — dark, tortured, brilliant and tragic. Born into troubled conditions, Poe’s life hardly improved over the years, and when it did, his happiness or triumph was always brief. His work was lauded during his lifetime, but his lifestyle never came close to matching the legacy that would swell in the decades following his death. And that untimely end, so mysterious and pathetic, was an event that only Poe or Fate could have been macabre enough to script. However, in spite of (or perhaps because of) all of his suffering, Poe remains one of the great forces in American literature, particularly during its formative years. He was a pioneer of multiple literary traditions, including the gothic, horror, dark Romanticism, detective, satire, hoax and science fiction genres.  
  	There is no greater accolade for a writer than for their name to become an adjective. For example, any story that deals with a dystopian future is likely to be called “Orwellian” following the success of the novel 1984 by English writer George Orwell. But within the horror genre, Lovecraft’s work, filled with madness and brooding menace and set in a semi-fictional world of his own creation, gave rise to the use of the term “Lovecraftian” to describe similar works. Despite this accolade, however, Lovecraft achieved almost no commercial success and very little recognition during his lifetime. His output also seems disproportionately small compared to his current influence - he never wrote a full-length novel, and most of his fiction took the form of short stories published in various magazines. It was only after his death that his fiction was regarded as more significant than the bulk of horror fiction written in the 1920s and 1930s.

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  Beijing Bastard - Into the Wilds...

  Val Wang

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  Raised in a strict Chinese-American household, Val Wang dutifully got good grades, took piano lessons, and performed in a Chinese dance troupe—until she shaved her head and became a leftist. But Val's true mutiny was when she moved to China, the land her parents had fled.In 1998, Val arrives in Beijing expecting to find freedom . . . but she finds her traditional relatives instead. She discovers a city rebelling against its roots, struggling to find a new, modern identity like her. A thriving avant-garde subculture makes art out of the chaos in Beijing's gritty outskirts.Brilliantly observed and winningly told, Beijing Bastard is a compelling story of a young woman finding her place in the world and of China, as its ancient past gives way to a dazzling but uncertain future.

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