Cultural Memoir

When she was two years old, Brenda and her siblings were taken from their parents. For the next five years she was a much-loved daughter in a white family, a happy child in a country town on the outskirts of Sydney, unaware of the existence of her Aboriginal family or how hard her parents were fighting for her return – unaware of her Aboriginal identity. Then, suddenly, she was reunited with her birth family, the last daughter to come home.

At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Lydia Abarca was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company—the Dance Theatre of Harlem, a troupe of women and men who became each other’s chosen family. She was the first Black company ballerina on the cover of Dance magazine, an Essence cover star; she was cast in The Wiz and in a Bob Fosse production on Broadway.

Approaching his 30th birthday, Sopan Deb had found comfort in his day job as a writer for the New York Times and a comedian. But his stage material highlighting his South Asian culture only masked the insecurities borne from his family history. Sure, Deb knew the facts: His parents, both Indian, separately immigrated to North America in the 1960s and 1970s. They were brought together in a volatile and ultimately doomed arranged marriage and raised a family in New Jersey before his father returned to India alone. But Deb had never learned who his parents were as individuals.

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 collection of publicly available writings, speeches and interviews by Steve Bantu Biko in the seminal time of the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s. These are collated into audio to give Biko a voice in these modern times that so desperately needs to listen to him. Biko's words are not only prophetic but also show the importance of deep socio-philosophical thought that is rooted in actual praxis to solve lived realities.

Что появилось раньше - человек или зеркало? Этим вопросом задается Паола Дмитриевна Волкова в четвертом томе цикла "Мост через бездну". Для великих мастеров портрет всегда был не просто изображением человека, но и зеркалом, отражающим не только внешнюю, но и внутреннюю красоту.

As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family—adopted, biological, chosen—and "community"; heternormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and a personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge.

Beloved British journalist Daniel Finkelstein tells the extraordinary story of the years before his mother met his father—years of war and trials they barely survived. Daniel Finkelstein's grandfather was a German Jewish intellectual leader who tolled an early warning of the impending Holocaust and became an archivist of Nazi crimes. He relocated his family to safety in Amsterdam, where they knew Anne Frank. But in those years safety was an illusion: Anne Frank famously went into hiding and Daniel's mother, Mirjam, also still a child, was sent to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and sisters.

A chronicle of the divergent journeys of a father, who fled post-war Vietnam on a small boat to find refuge in the United States, and his American-born daughter, who ventures to Vietnam as an adult, capturing the stark contrast between their perspectives on their shared homeland, as they search for common ground and a path toward mutual healing.

Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood. Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that.

Growing up in the Bronx, Joél Leon was taught that being soft, being vulnerable, could end your life. Shaped by a singular view of Black masculinity espoused by the media, by family and friends, and by society, he learned instead to care about the gold around his neck and the number of bills in his wallet. He absorbed the “facts” that white was always right and Black men were seen as threatening or great for comic relief but never worthy of the opening credits. It wasn’t until years later that Joél understood he didn’t have to be defined by these things.

The daughter of slaves, Madam C.J. Walker was orphaned at seven, married at 14, and widowed at 20. She spent the better part of the next two decades laboring as a washerwoman for $1.50 a week. Then - with the discovery of a revolutionary hair care formula for Black women - everything changed. By her death in 1919, Walker managed to overcome astonishing odds: Building a storied beauty empire from the ground up that would be run by four generations of Walker women until its sale in 1985.

In Swimming to Freedom, Kent Wong captures his childhood amidst revolutionary times, where boyish adventures and school days mixed with dire poverty and political persecution. Mao’s Hundred Flower Campaign had ensnared Kent’s father. A decade later, the Cultural Revolution closed schools, plunged the country into chaos, and scattered Kent and his sisters to disparate villages, where they struggled to eke out a bare existence.

Today's Birmingham—led by Mayor Randall Woodfin—is a phoenix rising from the ashes of systemic racism and white flight. This first Southern city to pluck the feathers off Jim Crow, where peaceful protesters endured attacks by police dogs, where high-pressure water hoses tore at the flesh of men and women marching for their rights, and where children locked arms and sang "We Shall Overcome," is a living, breathing redemption story.

In the 34 years since his retirement, Henry Aaron’s reputation has only grown in magnitude: He broke existing records (rbis, total bases, extra-base hits) and set new ones (hitting at least 30 home runs per season 15 times, becoming the first player in history to hammer 500 home runs and three thousand hits). But his influence extends beyond statistics, and at long last here is the first definitive biography of one of baseball’s immortal figures.

On a Move is one of the most unimaginable stories of injustice and resilience in recent American history. But it is not only one of tragedy. It is about coming-of-age for a young activist, the strong ties of family, and, against all odds, learning how to take indignities on the chin and to work within the very system that created them. At once a harrowing personal account and an impassioned examination of racism and police violence, On a Move testifies to the power of love and hope, in the face of astonishing wrongdoing.

How does a white kid from the New York suburbs, harmonica in hand, end up earning himself a busker's spot on the Harlem sidewalks next to Mr. Satan, a Mississippi-born legend? How did an interracial blues duo fare on the streets of New York during a turbulent, fractious time marked by racially-motivated murders in Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, and Crown Heights?

As the world's attention traces the reluctant social advances in the Middle East, Princess Sultana and her female friends and family have stepped forward to rescue young women in the region who are cruelly mistreated by their husbands, their fathers, and the brutish ISIS soldiers who kidnap them. But inside the Princess' lavish Saudi Arabian palace, sparks of anger and bolts of fear crackle because of the secrets kept to forward her efforts to help women and children.

The '90s was the decade when British culture reclaimed its position at the artistic centre of the world. Not since the 'Swinging Sixties' had art, comedy, fashion, film, football, literature and music interwoven into a blooming of national self-confidence. It was the decade of Lad Culture and Girl Power, of Blur vs Oasis. When fashion runways shone with British talent, Young British Artists became household names, football was 'coming home' and British film went worldwide.

Into Williams's childhood home-a one-story ranch house-his father crammed more books than the local library could hold. "Pappy" used some of these volumes to run an academic prep service; the rest he used in his unending pursuit of wisdom. His son's pursuits were quite different: "money, hoes, and clothes."