Showing results by narrator "Mirron Willis" in All Categories

Lloyd Daniels learned to hoop on the playgrounds of Brooklyn and Queens during the 1980s. "Swee'pea" they called him. His rep on the court traveled all the way to the Bronx and across the country, earning him enthusiastic comparisons to the likes of Magic Johnson. Swee'pea was sure to make it to the big time and out of a New York City where drugs and violence had gripped many of its neighborhoods. Eventually he did, leaving the city's asphalt courts for the shiny hardwoods of NCAA programs.

Letters of a Nation is a unique and timeless collection of extraordinary letters spanning more than 350 years of American history, from the arrival of the Pilgrims to the present day. Many of the more than 200 letters are published here for the first time, and the correspondents are the celebrated and obscure, the powerful and powerless, including presidents, slaves, soldiers, prisoners, explorers, writers, revolutionaries, Native Americans, artists, religious and civil rights leaders, and people from all walks of life.

When Barack Obama took office, he brought with him a new group of foreign policy advisors intent on carving out a new global role for America in the wake of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. Now the acclaimed author of Rise of the Vulcans offers a definitive, even-handed account of the messier realities they’ve faced in implementing their policies. In The Obamians, acclaimed author James Mann tells the compelling story of the administration’s struggle to enact a coherent and effective set of policies in a time of global turmoil.

In 2003, the book Nigger started an intense conversation about the uses and implications of that epithet. The N Word moves beyond that short, provocative book by revealing how the word has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America.

Mystery sensation Pelecanos pens the lead story and edits this groundbreaking collection of stories detailing the seedy underside of the nation's capital. This is not an anthology of ill-conceived and inauthentic political thrillers. Instead, in D.C. Noir, pimps, whores, gangsters, and con-men run rampant in zones of this city that most never hear about.

Jeebleh is returning to Mogadiscio, Somalia, for the first time in 20 years. But this is not a nostalgia trip - his last residence there was a jail cell. And who could feel nostalgic for a city like this? U.S. troops have come and gone, and the decimated city is ruled by clan warlords and patrolled by qaat-chewing gangs who shoot civilians to relieve their adolescent boredom.

Death awaits the curious! Out along the rim of the galaxy hangs a loose configuration of some 60 stars known as the Faustian Chain. This whorl of sparkling suns is rich in planets and occupies an irregular volume of space some 20 light years in diameter. From an external viewpoint, the Chain presents a colorful display of plasma-streams, luminous nebulae and sparkling pinpoints of light.

The once mighty kingdom of Jorsk is in decline, its borders beset by enemies, both worldly and otherworldly. The king has retreated to the capital, abandoning the far-flung provinces. The only hope of the people lies in their Chosen One, blessed by the gods as defender of the realm. But of late every Chosen One has died, targeted by the harshest of the enemy attacks. Only the most desperate of men now seek that post. Devlin Stonehand is a desperate man....

In the summer of 1952, 20 prominent men gather at a secret meeting on Martha's Vineyard and devise a plot to manipulate the President of the United States. Soon after, the body of one of these men is found by Eddie Wesley, Harlem's rising literary star. When Eddie's younger sister mysteriously disappears, Eddie and the woman he loves, Aurelia Treene, are pulled into what becomes a 20-year search for the truth.

Barlowe, a single African-American in his 40s, shares a ramshackle house with his 20-something nephew in the old Fourth Ward of downtown Atlanta. When Sean and Sandy, a white married couple from Philadelphia, buy and renovate the house next door in anticipation of a neighborhood "turnaround", everyone tries at first to go about their daily business. But fear and suspicion begin to build as more and more new whites move in and make changes, and once familiar people and places disappear.

For nearly 15 years NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture has been a leading scholarly journal of baseball history. Covering the cultural and historical implications of America’s national pastime, NINE has explored baseball from the earliest matches and little-known players of the 1800s to the modern billion-dollar industry and its superstars of today. Here, gathered for the first time, are the best essays from NINE that center on the complex and multifaceted topic of African Americans in baseball.

His shipmates dead, star rigger Gev Carlyle is adrift in the Flux, the subjective hyperdimensional sea that carries ships between the stars. His lone companion, and sole hope for survival, is a suicidal catlike alien named Cephean. Only a compatible rigger team, their visions meshed in psychic unity, can safely harness the turbulent currents of the Flux - and Carlyle's ship is sailing inexorably toward the deadly maelstrom of the Hurricane Flume. For even a chance at survival, he needs Cephean's help. But the price for that is a complete merging of minds and memories.

Starrshima Fields, aka Starr, is a young, bodacious, and bold beauty. She is also the leader of the Double G's, a powerful and ruthless social club of plus-sized women. Starr is guided by Queen Fem, the founder of the Double G's. Queen Fem set up the group of professionals-by-day, gangster-biker-chicks-by-night to prove that this isn't just a man's world. The Double G's put the squeeze on their primary targets: men of power and privilege. Blackmail and manipulation are their choice of weapons, and they are skillful in both.

In a warehouse full of forgotten books, a man at the beginning of his adult life - and the end of his career rope - becomes involved with a woman, a language, and a great lie that will define his future. He runs across Itsik Malpesh, an old Russian immigrant who claims to be the last Yiddish poet in America. When a set of accounting ledgers in which Malpesh has written his memoirs surfaces, the young man is compelled to translate them, bringing together two paths that coincide in shocking and unexpected ways.

Starr Fields sits in the Clark County jail after being released then re-arrested and held without bail. She uses her time wisely during her incarceration. After making examples out of a few of the other inmates and putting the squeeze on her unit Double Gs style, Starr recruits some new talent for a plan she intends to execute when she gets out. Queen Fem isn't happy about all of the sudden attention on the Double Gs organization.

It's 1951 in Sedalia, Missouri, and ragtime is making a comeback. When Brun Campbell, the old Ragtime Kid, learns of a journal kept by Scott Joplin, he hopes to acquire it and use it to convince Sedalia's movers and shakers to set up a ragtime museum. But plenty of other people also want that journal, including a historian who wants to publish it, an old friend of Joplin’s who wants to suppress it, and two Klansmen who don't care if they have to kill someone to get it.

Chicago, 1969: The trial of eight protestors from the Democratic Convention the previous year has the whole world watching - and all of Chicagoland on edge. Smokey Dalton feels the pressure: more cops on the streets, more FBI in his neighborhood. But when the landlord at one of Sturdy Investments’ South Side properties dies alone in his apartment, Smokey agrees to investigate. He finds old human bones in the basement, along with hints of more. Smokey and his girlfriend, Sturdy’s CEO Laura Hathaway, worry that Laura’s father knew who used that basement and why.

On the run after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Private Investigator Smokey Dalton and Jimmy, the young boy he rescued, have settled under assumed names in Chicago. But history won’t leave him alone. His job in security at the Chicago Hilton places him in the center of the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Worse, a killer works his South Side neighborhood, killing children. Smokey can’t ignore the crimes, any more than he can ignore the tension building in the city that hot August. He has to take action, before he loses everything.

Devlin of Duncaer has done the impossible. Desperate for death in the wake of his family's slaughter, he agreed to become the Chosen One of the neighboring Kingdom of Jorsk - the kingdom which conquered and enslaved his own native land of Duncaer. The job involved magically binding himself to Jorsk and its needs by a powerfu Geas spell, and used to come with about a three months survival time - until Devlin.

A dozen years after his last visit, Jeebleh returns to his beloved Mogadiscio to see old friends. He is accompanied by his son-in-law, Malik, a journalist intent on covering the region's ongoing turmoil. What greets them at first is not the chaos Jeebleh remembers, however, but an eerie calm enforced by ubiquitous white-robed figures bearing whips.