"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...

One whirlwind week of love, blackmail, and betrayal in teeming prewar New York. June 1939. Francis Dempsey and his shell-shocked brother, Michael, are on an ocean liner from Ireland bound for their brother Martin's home in New York City, having stolen a small fortune from the IRA. During the week that follows, the lives of these three brothers collide spectacularly with big-band jazz musicians, a talented but fragile heiress, a Jewish street photographer...

Long before she became known as the Cactus Queen, Minerva Hamilton Hoyt found solace in the unexpected beauty of the Mojave Desert in California. She loved the jackrabbits and coyotes, the prickly cacti, and especially the weird, spiky Joshua trees. However, in the 1920s, hardly anyone else felt the same way. The desert was being thoughtlessly destroyed by anyone and everyone. Minerva knew she needed to bring attention to the problem. With the help...

"Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of...

From the Founding to today, this book tells the stories of seven former presidents who each changed history and offered lessons about how to decide what to do in the next chapter of life as they handled human problems of ego, finances and questions about their legacy and mortality.

For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be examined and ignored, idealized and sexualized, shamed, subjugated, mutilated, and dismissed. The notion that female bodies are flawed inversions of the male ideal lingers on, as do the pervasive societal stigmas and ignorance that shape women's health and relationships with their own bodies. The author draws back the curtain on the collective medical...

"A powerful true story about three Black girls who courageously integrated a New Orleans school on November 14, 1960, told by award-winning author Vaunda Micheaux Nelson"--

"The first definitive exploration of the role of the twenty-first century First Lady, painting a comprehensive portrait of Jill Biden and the evolution of the First Lady's role from ceremonial figurehead to political operative-from a White House correspondent for The New York Times. Since the Clinton era, tectonic shifts in media, politics, and pop culture have all redefined expectations of First Ladies, even as the boundaries set upon them have at...

From an award-winning journalist comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.

"A tribute to Abraham Cahan, founder of a prominent Yiddish language newspaper whose discussion of everything from voting rights to baseball offered crucial guidance to Jewish immigrants"--