Cultural Memoir

Sonny Rollins has long been considered an enigma. Known as the "Saxophone Colossus," he is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz improvisers of all time. His seven-decade career has been well documented, but the backstage life of the man once called "the only jazz recluse" has gone largely untold—until now. Based on more than 200 interviews with Rollins himself, family members, friends, and collaborators, as well as Rollins' personal archive, Saxophone Colossus is the comprehensive portrait of this legendary saxophonist and composer, civil rights activist and environmentalist.

Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history - a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. And yet in the century since her death, next to nothing has been written about this extraordinary woman aside from juvenile biographies. The truth about Harriet Tubman has become lost inside a legend woven of racial and gender stereotypes.

In The Barefoot Bingo Caller, Antanas Sileika finds what's funny and touching in the most unlikely places, from the bingo hall to the collapsing Soviet Union. He shares stories that span his attempts to shake off his suburban, ethnic, folk-dancing childhood to his divided allegiance as a Lithuanian-Canadian father. Antanas has a keen eye for social comedy.

In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.

In 2018 Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene took to social media to share her suspicions that the California wildfires were started by 'space solar generators' which were funded by powerful, mysterious backers. Instantly, thousands of people rallied around her, blaming the fires on "Jewish space lasers" and, ultimately, the Rothschild family. For more than 200 years, the name "Rothschild" has been synonymous with two things: great wealth, and conspiracy theories about what they're "really doing" with it.

Frank Cascio was a close friend of tragic superstar Michael Jackson for more than twenty-five years. In My Friend Michael, Cascio offers a deeply personal, behind-the-scenes look at the Michael Jackson he knew. Filled with never-before-told stories and intimate details, My Friend Michael is the...

The first and only full biography on legendary Harlem gangster, Bumpy Johnson who was depicted in the movies Cotton Club, Hoodlum, and American Gangster.

Like much of North Korea, Songmi Han lived in desperate poverty. As a child, she and her family endured extreme hardship, with many meals consisting of little more than grass. Domestic abuse, grueling physical labor, emotional abuse, and hunger were constant in her life. School was out of the question, and she and her mother stole food to survive. Greenlight to Freedom: A North Korean Daughter’s Search for Her Mother and Herself, written by Songmi Han and Casey Lartigue Jr., recounts Songmi’s childhood and escape from North Korea in a perilous and gripping narrative.

A Universityのテーマは「複雑な世界で、より善く生きる」
タイパ・コスパと言った、いかに効率よく生きるかを競うことばかりに注目が集まる時代。これまでの幸せや成功の価値観で生きていくにはあまりにも不確定で困難な時代に「要領よく生きる」だけではない別の選択肢を考えたい。

Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina - a place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else" - has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, listeners meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be "the rare bird, the oddity".

Gordon Gill is a gentle, hard-working Métis man whose journey began on his Iroquois-Cree grandfather’s trapline and evolved into a successful business career. His story is one of change and the passing of not just one, but several eras in the development of Canada’s North and the evolution of the Indigenous struggle. A Métis Man's Dream: From Traplines to Tugboats in Canada's North details the history he met, and made, along the way.

What would life be like for a Black boy growing up in Nazi Germany? This unprecedented autobiography answers that question with the spellbinding true story of Hans J. Massaquoi’s life in Hamburg during the height of Hitler’s regime. Hans is the son of a Black Liberian diplomat father and a white German mother. His father returns to Africa at the beginning of the war, leaving them behind in poverty without the means to flee. Within this tense atmosphere, increasingly violent Nazi policies and Allied bombing raids make Hans and his mother’s lives a day-to-day survival struggle.

A military memoir by a biracial child of refugees and survivors, Roadside is about life and death, about family lost and gained, and about America, as a dream and a reality. It’s about the roads one takes to leave home and find it again.

"You will be a son, my daughter." With these stunning words Ukmina learned that she was to spend her childhood as a boy. In Afghanistan there is a widespread practice of girls dressing as boys to play the role of a son. These children are called bacha posh: literally "girls dressed as boys." This practice offers families the freedom to allow their child to shop and work - and in some cases, it saves them from the disgrace of not having a male heir. But in adolescence, religion restores the natural law.

The Stone Thrower is a moving story about race and destiny written by a daughter looking for answers about her own Black history. Using insightful interviews, archival records, and her personal reflections, Richardson’s journey to learn about her father’s past leads her to her own important discoveries about herself and what it really means to be Black in Canada.

Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when Ishikawa was just thirteen years old, and unwittingly became members of the lowest social caste. His father, himself a Korean national, was lured to the new Communist country by promises of abundant work, education for his children, and a higher station in society. But the reality of their new life was far from utopian.

Providing his thought-provoking insights on race, fame, and politics, a fascinating glimpse into the life and work of Dick Gregory, one of America's top comedians and civil rights workers, details the many challenges he has overcome and the many friends he has made along the way, including Dr. Martin Luther King and John Lennon.

In 1982, Sally Morgan travelled back to her grandmother's birthplace. What started as a tentative search for information about her family, turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. My Place is a moving account of a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

"The numerous voices presenting these oral histories are flowing, velvety, glib, humorous, and always passionate...This is an informative and heartwarming retrospective of life in the Bronx, in addition to an enlightening look at the changes in our society and culture." — Publishers Weekly...

NPR Great Read of 2016 Author and Guardian US columnist Jessica Valenti has been leading the national conversation on gender and politics for over a decade. Now, in a darkly funny and bracing memoir, Valenti explores the toll that sexism takes from the every day to the existential. Sex...