Cultural Memoir

For her whole life, Souad Mekhennet, a reporter for the Washington Post who was born and educated in Germany, has had to balance the two sides of her upbringing - Muslim and Western. She has also sought to provide a mediating voice between these cultures, which too often misunderstand each other.

Tsitsi Dangarembga examines the legacy of imperialism on her own life and on every aspect of black embodied African life. This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender. Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa by human trafficking and enslavement. Black and Female is a powerful testimony of the pervasive and long-lasting effects of racism and patriarchy that provides an ultimately hopeful vision for change.

Cinco años después de publicar su ópera prima, Cuando era puertorriqueña, Esmeralda Santiago continuó la narración de sus memorias en Casi una mujer. En este volumen, “Negi”, mote cariñoso que recibe la autora, cuenta sus años adolescentes en un Nueva York convulso en plena década de los años sesenta. En un pequeño apartamento de Brooklyn, rodeada de 10 hermanos y una madre que se apoyaba en ella por ser la mayor, vive el cambio de niña a mujer.

When the Titanic sank on a cold night in 1912, barely 700 people escaped with their lives. Among them were six Chinese men. Arriving in New York, these six were met with suspicion and slander. Less than 24 hours later, they were expelled from the country and vanished. When historian Steven Schwankert first stumbled across the fact that eight Chinese nationals were on-board, of whom all but two survived, he couldn’t believe that there could still be untold personal histories from the Titanic. Now, at last, their story can be told.

Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was a Black political activist, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, which had a following of more than six million African descended people worldwide. Despite his massive popularity, this Jamaican born international leader was wrongfully sentenced to prison by the U.S. government on trumped-up mail-fraud charges.

¡Hola Papi! columnist John Paul Brammer’s Authentically Mexican is the hilarious and heartfelt story of his Mexican American family in diaspora, exploring his heritage and identity through six meaningful meals.

A Place to Stand is Jimmy Santiago Baca's memoir of childhood on the small farms of New Mexico, his adolescence spent in orphanages and detention centers, his years as a drug dealer in San Diego and Arizona, and his extraordinary personal transformation under the harrowing conditions behind bars. Life in prison was often brutal, and Baca describes the extreme measures he had to take to survive, which endowed him with an indomitable will to resist the dehumanization of prison life. The act of writing offered a powerful means of transcending his surroundings.

American schoolchildren have long learned about Squanto, the welcoming Native who made the First Thanksgiving possible, but his story goes deeper than the holiday legend. Born in the Wampanoag-speaking town of Patuxet in the late 1500s, Squanto was kidnapped in 1614 by an English captain, who took him to Spain. From there, Englishmen brought him to London and Newfoundland before sending him home in 1619, when Squanto discovered that most of Patuxet had died in an epidemic. A year later, the Mayflower colonists arrived at his home and renamed it Plymouth.

As a student of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, Howard Baskerville was aflame not only with the gospel of Jesus, but with the Wilsonian gospel that constitutional democracy is the birthright of all nations. Rather than become a small-town minister like his father in South Dakota, he volunteered for missionary service in Persia. Tabriz in 1907 was a hotbed of democratic revolution. Brilliant young firebrands were among Baskerville’s students at the Presbyterian school—and became his devoted friends. He lectured on freedom; they dedicated their lives to it.

Zwei Rentner aus Sachsen-Anhalt verreisen mit ihrem Sohn. Was soll schon schiefgehen...?! «Urlaub mit den Eltern. Wir sitzen 5 (!) Stunden vor Abflug am Flughafen, und Mutter verzweifelt, weil sie die Bordkarten auf DIN A3 ausgedruckt hat und denkt, dass wir deshalb nicht mitfliegen dürfen.» So begann André Herrmann, 36, Comedian aus Berlin, die Dokumentation seiner Reise mit seinen Eltern, die binnen kürzester Zeit viral ging. Unter dem Hashtag #UmdE berichtet er acht Tage lang von den Unwegsamkeiten der gemeinsamen Reise und begeisterte damit schnell eine riesige Followerschaft.

Habiburahman was born in 1979 and raised in a small village in western Burma. When he was three years old, the country’s military leader declared that his people, the Rohingya, were not a recognized ethnic group. Since 1982, millions of Rohingya have had to flee their homes as a result of extreme prejudice and persecution. Here, for the first time, a Rohingya speaks up to expose the truth behind this global humanitarian crisis. Through the eyes of a child, we learn about the historic persecution of the Rohingya people and witness the violence Habiburahman endured.

Tony Dungy's words and example have intrigued millions of people, particularly following his victory in Super Bowl XLI, the first for an African-American coach. How is it possible for a coach—especially a football coach—to win the respect of his players and lead them to the Super Bowl without the screaming histrionics, the profanities, the demand that the sport come before anything else? How is it possible for anyone to be successful without compromising faith and family?

Own it, snowflakes: you've lost everything you claim to hold dear. White is Bret Easton Ellis's first work of nonfiction. Already the bad boy of American literature, from Less Than Zero to American Psycho, Ellis has also earned the wrath of right-thinking people everywhere with his...

This "graceful, captivating" (New York Times Book Review) story from a singular new talent paints a portrait of grief and the search for meaning as told through the prism of three generations of her Chinese American family—perfect for readers of Helen Macdonald and Elizabeth Alexander. Kat...

At 35, Leslie Buck made an impulsive decision to put her personal life on hold to pursue her passion. Leaving behind a full life of friends, love, and professional security, she became the first American woman to learn pruning from one of the most storied landscaping companies in Kyoto. Cutting Back recounts Buck's bold journey and the revelations she has along the way.

Veteran Toronto Star editor Haroon Siddiqui, brown and Muslim, has spent a life on the media front lines, covering conflicts both global and local. Siddiqui’s journey took him from a divided India to a welcoming Canada—until the cataclysm of 9/11 hardened attitudes to Muslims around the world. His personal story weaves through growing Islamophobia in both India and North America. Siddiqui's experiences in the corridors of power in newsrooms and warzones are threaded with insights about historic changes in the last seventy years in India and Canada.

Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

In this riveting memoir, Wade challenges Africans to redefine their narrative, casting aside imposed inferiority to reclaim their innate brilliance. This is not a recounting of poverty and politics. It's an indictment of a world that views Africa as nothing more than a colonial chessboard, with charity acting as the block that keeps Africans stuck. The surprising truth: Africa’s problems are not due to colonialism, corruption, bad leadership, poor skills, or a lack of education. It’s something much bigger, and yet it’s only been visible to entrepreneurs...until now.

The House of Twenty Thousand Books is the story of Chimen Abramsky, an extraordinary polymath and bibliophile who amassed a vast collection of socialist literature and Jewish history. For more than 50 years, Chimen and his wife, Miriam, hosted epic gatherings in their house of books that brought together many of the age's greatest thinkers.

Senior editor at L.A. Magazine RJ Smith saw his first book, The Great Black Way, win the coveted California Book Award. With The One, Smith profiles one of the 20th century’s most innovative musical icons, the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown. Drawing on extensive research and captivating interviews, Smith chronicles Brown’s rise from abject poverty to the pinnacle of fame, while also detailing Brown’s work as a civil rights activist and entrepreneur.