Other books that might interest you

• 

  Song for My Father

  Stephanie Stokes Oliver

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  On Election Day in 1960, a classmate of Stephanie Stokes Oliver threatened to beat her up. Why? Because in their class's mock presidential election, Stephanie revealed that she would follow her father's lead and vote for Nixon over Kennedy. Stephanie realized this day that her family was different from most other African Americans at the time: They were Republicans.Song for My Father is Stokes Oliver's memoir of her father, Charles M. Stokes, a prominent member of the National Republican Party. Known as "Stokey," this pioneering black man in the fields of law, legislation, and politics raised three children in the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, when memories of the Republican Party as the party of Abraham Lincoln -- and association of the party with the emancipation of slaves -- had faded. As Stephanie came of age, she and her father disagreed on everything -- especially politics -- but they were bound by mutual love and respect.Born in Kansas in the early twentieth century, Charles M. Stokes established himself in his home state as a lawyer and a Republican leader before moving in 1943 to Seattle, where he was the only black attorney in private practice. He later became Seattle's first black state legislator and served as Washington State's first African-American district court judge. When he ran for lieutenant governor in 1960, Stokes was narrowly defeated in the primary, but his political race blazed a trail for other African Americans in both local and national politics. This is Stokes Oliver's tribute to a larger-than-life father, but it is also the inspiring story of an American family who worked, struggled, dreamed, and succeeded.

  Show book

• 

  Come Out Smokin' - Joe Frazier:...

  Phil Pepe

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The first book ever to delve into the life of the legendary heavyweight boxing champion.   Acclaimed sportswriter Phil Pepe explores the iconic boxer “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier’s early beginnings. From his dirt poor childhood and relationship with his father to his street fights and Olympic boxing championship, Pepe’s book follows Frazier’s rise, culminating in the “Fight of the Century” with Muhammad Ali. Pepe beat all other writers to the punch in his seminal work on the champ nobody knew. Originally published in 1972, now available in ebook format for the first time.

  Show book

• 

  Take You Wherever You Go

  Kenny Leon, Samuel L. Jackson

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  From Tony Award-winning director and recipient of the prestigious Mr. Abbott Award, Kenny Leon, comes a powerful memoir of the lessons he has learned on his incredible life journey. When Kenny Leon's grandmother told him to "take you wherever you go," she could hardly have anticipated that he would establish himself as one of Broadway's most exciting and acclaimed directors. But through years of hard work, Kenny would migrate from a small wooden house in rural Florida to the Tony Awards' stage, where he would win Best Direction of a Play for his 2014 revival of A Raisin in the Sun.   In Take You Wherever You Go, Leon reflects on the pillars of wisdom he learned every step of the way from the most important people in his life--from his grandmother's sagacious and encouraging motivations to the steady hand of his mother to the deep artistic and social influence of iconic American playwright August Wilson. Take You Wherever You Go is a poignant, ruminative, and inspirational memoir that empowers you to be true to yourself as you navigate your own path.

  Show book

• 

  African American Women Poets...

  Phyllis Wheatley

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Race and gender have denied many their rightful place in the canon of humanity’s arts. 
   
  In today’s world, in the blink of an electronic pulse, words can be transported across continents and peoples and all too easily lost in the ever-growing mass of disposable culture of ‘me-me-me’ and ‘more- more-more’.  We can all be ‘woke’ be ‘politically correct’ be outraged at a transgression or even a slight.  Everything means something to someone.  
   
  But, once again, more modern times miss the reality of what others in previous generations suffered in the battle for equality and recognition.  In America, to be black and a woman over the years this volume covers, was to be chattel, to be bartered, sold, trafficked and used for no more than the whims of others. 
   
  It was a harsh reality, and yet…., and yet, these women produced verse that sears our souls with the ambition to tell others, to share with us all, what life was like, what was endured and the heartbreak of what their reality was.  They could not be overcome; their voice sought to endure and not be smothered.   
   
  Words are powerful weapons, they form ideas, they create movements and manifestos that can change the world.  Many of the women in this volume added to those words, to that desire that the words of their Constitution would someday include themselves.   The fight is not yet wholly won, prejudice and inequality still single them out but the flame of hope, of destiny continues to burn fiercely with their names.   
   
  Their poetry is not solely of protest but rich in a range of subjects embracing tenderness, love, family and includes works by Alice Dunbar Nelson, Frances W Harper, Phyllis Wheatley, Zora Neale Hurston, Esther Popel, Clarissa Scott Delany and many others whose voice voices call to us through the years. 
   
  01 - African American Women Poets from 1746 to the Harlem Renaissance - An Introduction 
  02 - Bars Fight by Lucy Terry 
  03 - On Virtue by Phyllis Wheatley 
  04 - To a Lady and Her Children on the Death of Her Son and Their Brother by Phyllis Wheatley 
  05 - An Hymn to the Morning by Phyllis Wheatley 
  06 - An Hymn to the Evening by Phyllis Wheatley 
  07 - Bury Me in a Free Land by Frances E W Harper 
  08 - My Mother's Kiss by Frances E W Harper 
  09 - The Slave Trade Girl's Address to Her Mother by Sarah Louisa Forten 
  10 - Burial of Sarah by Frances E W Harper 
  11 - Reflections, Written On Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend by Ann Plato 
  12 - The Natives of America by Ann Plato 
  13 - The Angel's Visit by Charlotte L Forten Grimke 
  14 - Disappointment by May E Tucker 
  15 - Light In Darkness by Mary E Tucker 
  16 - Hope by Mary E Tucker 
  17 - Drifts That Bar My Door by Adah Isaacs Menken 
  18 - Infelix by Adah Isaacs Menken 
  19 - Aspiration by Adah Isaacs Menken 
  20 - The Coming Woman by Mary Weston Fordham 
  21 - In Memorium. Alphonse Campbell Fordham by Mary Weston Fordham 
  22 - Aspiration by Henrietta Cordelia Ray 
  23 - Life by Henrietta Cordelia Ray 
  24 - Scraps of Time by Charlotte E Linden 
  25 - Brave Man and Brave Woman by Charlotte E Linden 
  26 - What Constitutes A Negro by Eva Carter Buckner 
  27 - Thine Own by Josephine Delphine Henderson Heard 
  28 - The Black Sampson by Josephine Delphine Henderson Heard 
  29 - The Singer and the Song (To Paul Laurence Dunbar) by Carrie Williams Clifford 
  30 - The Widening Light by Carrie Williams Clifford 
  31 - The Door of Hope by Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer 
  32 - Negro Heroines by Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer 
  33 - The Voice of the Negro by Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer 
  34 - The Angel's Message by Clara Ann Thompson 
  35 - Not Dead, But Sleeping by Clara Ann Thompson<p

  Show book

• 

  Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

  Martha Gellhorn, Caroline Moorehead

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  From Martha Gellhorn's critically acclaimed biographer, the first collected letters of this defining figure of the twentieth-centuryMartha Gellhorn's heroic career as a reporter brought her to the front lines of virtually every significant international conflict between the Spanish Civil War and the end of the Cold War. While Gellhorn's wartime dispatches rank among the best of the century, her personal letters are their equal: as vivid and fascinating as anything she ever published. Gellhorn's correspondence from 1930 to 1996—chronicling friendships with figures as diverse as Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, and H. G. Wells, as well as her tempestuous marriage to Ernest Hemingway—paint a vivid picture of the twentieth century as she lived it. Caroline Moorehead, who was granted exclusive access to the letters, has expertly edited this fascinating volume, providing prefatory and interstitial material that contextualizes Gellhorn's correspondence within the arc of her entire life. The letters introduce us to the woman behind the correspondent—a writer of wit, charm, and vulnerability. The result is an exhilarating, intimate portrait of one of the most accomplished women of modern times.

  Show book

• 

  Letters to Gwen John

  Celia Paul

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Celia Paul's Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876–1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John's reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John's life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public's reception of their work.Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters, and a writer/artist's daybook, describing Paul's first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband's diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic. Paul, who first revealed her talents as a writer with her memoir, Self-Portrait, enters with courage and resolve into new unguarded territory—the artist at present—and the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.Contains mature themes.

  Show book