Special Collections
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Description: The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award recognizes books that make important contributions to understanding racism and help develop an appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures. #award
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W. E. B. Du Bois
by David Levering LewisA definitive biography of the African-American author and scholar describes Du Bois's formative years, the evolution of his philosophy, and his roles as a founder of the NAACP and architect of the American civil rights movement.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Latin Deli
by Judith Ortiz CoferA community transplanted from what they now view as an island paradise, these Puerto Rican families yearn for the colors and tastes of their former home. As they carve out lives as Americans, their days are filled with drama, success, and sometimes tragedy.
Parallel Time
by Brent StaplesParallel Time is an evocative memoir that poses universal questions: Where does the family end and the self begin? What do we owe our families, and what do we owe our dreams for ourselves? What part of the past is a gift and what part a shackle?
For Brent Staples there is the added dimension of race: moving from a black world into one largely defined by whites.
The oldest song among nine children, Brent grew up in a small industrial town near Philadelphia.
First a scholarship to a local college and then one for graduate study at the University of Chicago pulled him out of the close family circle.
While he was away, the industries that supported the town failed, and drug dealing rushed in to fill the economic void.
News of arrests and premature deaths among Brent's childhood friends underscored the precariousness of his perch in a world of mostly white achievers. A younger brother became a cocaine dealer and was murdered by one of his "clients."
His death propelled Brent into a reconsideration of his childhood and coming-of-age that offers vivid portraits of family and place, of values that supported and pressures that tore apart, of the appeal and pain of entering a predominantly white world, and of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the black world he grew away from.
The Wedding
by Dorothy WestIn her first novel in forty-seven years, Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, offers an intimate glimpse into African American middle class.
Set on bucolic Martha's Vineyard in the 1950s,The Weddingtells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie.
Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society," we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from "a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions. " Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community.
With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class.
Amazing Grace
by Jonathan KozolThe author of Savage Inequalities, a New York Times best-seller, and Rachel and Her Children, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, tells the stories of a handful of children who have--through the love and support of their families and dedicated community leaders--not yet lost their battle with the perils of life in America's most hopeless, helpless, and dangerous neighborhoods.
All Souls' Rising
by Madison Smartt BellIn this first installment of his epic Haitian trilogy, Madison Smartt Bell brings to life a decisive moment in the history of race, class, and colonialism.
The slave uprising in Haiti was a momentous contribution to the tide of revolution that swept over the Western world at the end of the 1700s.
A brutal rebellion that strove to overturn a vicious system of slavery, the uprising successfully transformed Haiti from a European colony to the world's first Black republic.
From the center of this horrific maelstrom, the heroic figure of Toussaint Louverture-a loyal, literate slave and both a devout Catholic and Vodouisant-emerges as the man who will take the merciless fires of violence and vengeance and forge a revolutionary war fueled by liberty and equality.
Bell assembles a kaleidoscopic portrait of this seminal movement through a tableau of characters that encompass black, white, male, female, rich, poor, free and enslaved.
Pulsing with brilliant detail, All Soul's Rising provides a visceral sense of the pain, terror, confusion, and triumph of revolution.
The Magic Keys
by Albert MurrayIf Gabriel García Márquez had chosen to write about Pakistani immigrants in England, he might have produced a novel as beautiful and devastating asMaps for Lost Lovers. Jugnu and Chanda have disappeared. Like thousands of people all over Enland, they were lovers and living together out of wedlock. To Chanda’s family, however, the disgrace was unforgivable. Perhaps enough so as to warrant murder. As he explores the disappearance and its aftermath through the eyes of Jugnu’s worldly older brother, Shamas, and his devout wife, Kaukab, Nadeem Aslam creates a closely observed and affecting portrait of people whose traditions threaten to bury them alive. The result is a tour de force, intimate, affecting, tragic and suspenseful. From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Color of Water
by James McbrideWho is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children.
James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut,The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.
The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in "orchestrated chaos" with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn.
"Mommy," a fiercely protective woman with "dark eyes full of pep and fire," herded her brood to Manhattan's free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect.
As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion-and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain.
In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother's footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921.
Fleeing pogroms, her family emigrated to America and ultimately settled in Suffolk, Virginia, a small town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high.
With candor and immediacy, Ruth describes her parents' loveless marriage; her fragile, handicapped mother; her cruel, sexually-abusive father; and the rest of the family and life she abandoned.
At seventeen, after fleeing Virginia and settling in New York City, Ruth married a black minister and founded the all- black New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in her Red Hook living room. "God is the color of water," Ruth McBride taught her children, firmly convinced that life's blessings and life's values transcend race.
Twice widowed, and continually confronting overwhelming adversity and racism, Ruth's determination, drive and discipline saw her dozen children through college-and most through graduate school.
At age 65, she herself received a degree in social work from Temple University.
Interspersed throughout his mother's compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty, his flirtations with drugs and violence, and his eventual self- realization and professional success.
The Color of Water touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.
Autobiography Of My Mother
by Jamaica KincaidKincaid's new and long-awaited novel is a powerful and unforgettable story of loss, longing, loving, and survival that resonants with the proud insurgence of the human will. The story of Xuela, whose mother dies at the moment she is born, presents "an indeliable portrait of an angry woman" (New York Times) "most comparable, perhaps, to Camus' The Stranger" (Washington Post Book World).
The Learning Tree
by Gordon ParksPhotographer, writer, and composer, Gordon Parks has written a moving, true-to-life novel of growing up as a black man in this country in the 1900s. Hailed by critics and readers alike, The Learning Tree tells the extraordinary journey of a family as they struggle to understand the world around them and leave their mark a world that is better for their having been in it.
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
by Walter MosleyNew York Timesbestselling author Walter Mosley introduces an "astonishing character"(Los Angeles Times Book Review)in this acclaimed collection of entwined tales.
Meet Socrates Fortlow, a tough ex-con seeking truth and redemption in South Central Los Angeles -- and finding the miracle of survival. "I either committed a crime or had a crime done to me every day I was in jail.
Once you go to prison you belong there. "Socrates Fortlow has done his time: twenty-seven years for murder and rape, acts forged by his huge, rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts.
Working for the Bounty supermarket, and moving perilously close to invisibility, it is Socrates who throws a lifeline to a drowning man: young Darryl, whose shaky path is already bloodstained and fearsome.
In a place of violence and hopelessness, Socrates offers up his own battle-scarred wisdom that can turn the world around.
Walking with the Wind
by John Lewis and Michael D'OrsoAn eloquent, epic first-hand account of the civil rights movement by a man who lived it-- an American hero whose courage, vision, and dedication helped change history.
Cloudsplitter
by Russell BanksA triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.
Out of Place
by Edward W. SaidFrom one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past.
A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Said writes with great passion and wit about his family and his friends from his birthplace in Jerusalem, schools in Cairo, and summers in the mountains above Beirut, to boarding school and college in the United States, revealing an unimaginable world of rich, colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes.
Underscoring all is the confusion of identity the young Said experienced as he came to terms with the dissonance of being an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, and, ultimately, an outsider.
Richly detailed, moving, often profound, Out of Place depicts a young man's coming of age and the genesis of a great modern thinker.
A Gesture Life
by Chang-Rae LeeFranklin Hada has lived for 30 years in Bedley Run, New York. He has been respected and has been able to keep his dark secret. Now his adopted daughter and her son enter his life. Can he keep his respectability or will his life unravel?
Of Love and Dust
by Ernest J. GainesWhen Jim Kelly is put in charge of Marcus, a man alleged to have killed a man, his calm life is completely disrupted. Marcus is not a likable man. He admits to killing a man who he says deserved what he got. But when he begins to question the rules that black people are held to, Jim can't help but begin to respect and admire his courage.
W.E.B. Du Bois
by David Levering LewisThe second volume of the Pulitzer Prize--winning biography that The Washington Post hailed as "an engrossing masterpiece"
Charismatic, singularly determined, and controversial, W.E.B. Du Bois was a historian, novelist, editor, sociologist, founder of the NAACP, advocate of women's rights, and the premier architect of the Civil Rights movement. His hypnotic voice thunders out of David Levering Lewis's monumental biography like a locomotive under full steam.
This second volume of what is already a classic work begins with the triumphal return from WWI of African American veterans to the shattering reality of racism and lynching even as America discovers the New Negro of literature and art. In stunning detail, Lewis chronicles the little-known political agenda behind the Harlem Renaissance and Du Bois's relentless fight for equality and justice, including his steadfast refusal to allow whites to interpret the aspirations of black America. Seared by the rejection of terrified liberals and the black bourgeoisie during the Communist witch-hunts, Du Bois ended his days in uncompromising exile in newly independent Ghana. In re-creating the turbulent times in which he lived and fought, Lewis restores the inspiring and famed Du Bois to his central place in American history.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Blessing the Boats
by Lucille CliftonThis long-awaited collection from one of the most distinguished poets working today includes new poems written during the past four years as well as generous selections from previous collections.
Winner of the National Book Award
John Henry Days
by Colson WhiteheadColson Whitehead’s eagerly awaited and triumphantly acclaimed new novel is on one level a multifaceted retelling of the story of John Henry, the black steel-driver who died outracing a machine designed to replace him.
On another level it’s the story of a disaffected, middle-aged black journalist on a mission to set a record for junketeering who attends the annual John Henry Days festival.
It is also a high-velocity thrill ride through the tunnel where American legend gives way to American pop culture, replete with p. r. flacks, stamp collectors, blues men , and turn-of-the-century song pluggers.
John Henry Days is an acrobatic, intellectually dazzling, and laugh-out-loud funny book that will be read and talked about for years to come.
Vernon Can Read!
by Annette Gordon-Reed and Vernon JordanAs a young college student in Atlanta, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. had a summer job driving a white banker around town. During the man's post-luncheon siestas, Jordan passed the time reading books, a fact that astounded his boss. "Vernon can read!" the man exclaimed to his relatives. Nearly fifty years later, Vernon Jordan, now a senior executive at Lazard Freres, long-time civil rights leader, adviser and close friend to presidents and business leaders and one of the most charismatic figures in America, has written an unforgettable book about his life and times. The story of Vernon Jordan's life encompasses the sweeping struggles, changes, and dangers of African-American life in the civil rights revolution of the second half of the twentieth century.
Q
by Quincy JonesQuincy Jones has won multiple grammy awards. He has been acknowledged as a masterful jazz, rock, and funk musician, has created some of the most memorable film scores of the pop era, and has sat at the production controls for numerous landmark albums, including Michael Jackson's Thriller, the biggest-selling long-player of all time.
World Hotel
by Reetika VaziraniBorn in India and raised in the U.S., Reetika Vazirani is at the forefront of a group of young immigrant writers who are questioning citizenship and the effects of migration and immigration on the discovery of one's self. The topics she writes about--eastern culture meeting west--are both timely and timeless, as she demonstrates a love for storytelling, delights in the music and flavors of the world, and displays a subtle understanding of cross-cultural conflicts for women.
Divided into two sections, "Inventing Maya" and "It's Me, I'm Not at Home," World Hotel gives voice to those who are struggling with the burden of being different while also experiencing the thrill of transformation. There are poems written in memory of family members, to husbands, to lovers, and poems from mother to daughter.
Through her exquisite formal skills and linguistic range, Vazirani ultimately creates a home in poetry; for her readers she creates penetrating portraits and keen glimpses into a world which-for all its unfamiliarity-we recognize as strikingly similar to our own.
The Chapel Hill Rotary invited me twice, and I wore Aunty's yellow sari. I laugh, for ten years I lived on a mountain. I show them Mussoorie. They say it looks like the Blue Ridge. They're fascinated by so much silk-six yards on one girl--but I like dresses and scarves, red nail polish, and I will have to learn to dance. ... -from "Friday Mixer".
Born in India, Reetika Vazirani's first book,White Elephants, was selected for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She has received much recognition for her poetry, including a Pushcart Prize, a "Discovery" award from The Nation, and inclusion in Best American Poetry. Educated at Wellesley College and the University of Virginia, Vazirani serves as an advisory editor for Callaloo.
A Problem From Hell
by Samantha PowerIn 1993, as a 23-year-old correspondent covering the wars in the Balkans, I was initially comforted by the roar of NATO planes flying overhead.
President Clinton and other western leaders had sent the planes to monitor the Bosnian war, which had killed almost 200,000 civilians. But it soon became clear that NATO was unwilling to target those engaged in brutal "ethnic cleansing. " American statesmen described Bosnia as "a problem from hell," and for three and a half years refused to invest the diplomatic and military capital needed to stop the murder of innocents.
In Rwanda, around the same time, some 800,000 Tutsi and opposition Hutu were exterminated in the swiftest killing spree of the twentieth century. Again, the United States failed to intervene. This time U. S. policy-makers avoided labeling events "genocide" and spearheaded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers stationed in Rwanda who might have stopped the massacres underway.
Whatever America's commitment to Holocaust remembrance (embodied in the presence of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D. C. ), the United States has never intervened to stop genocide. This book is an effort to understand why.
While the history of America's response to genocide is not an uplifting one, "A Problem from Hell" tells the stories of countless Americans who took seriously the slogan of "never again" and tried to secure American intervention. Only by understanding the reasons for their small successes and colossal failures can we understand what we as a country, and we as citizens, could have done to stop the most savage crimes of the last century. -Samantha
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Emperor of Ocean Park
by Stephen L. CarterIn his triumphant fictional debut, Stephen Carter combines a large-scale, riveting novel of suspense with the saga of a unique family.
The Emperor of Ocean Park is set in two privileged worlds: the upper crust African American society of the Eastern seabord--families who summer at Martha's Vineyard--and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school.
Talcott Garland is a successful law professor, devoted father, and husband of a beautiful and ambitious woman, whose future desires may threaten the family he holds so dear.
When Talcott's father, Judge Oliver Garland, a disgraced former Supreme Court nominee, is found dead under suspicious circumstances, Talcott wonders if he may have been murdered.
Guided by the elements of a mysterious puzzle that his father left, Talcott must risk his marriage, his career and even his life in his quest for justice.
Superbly written and filled with memorable characters, The Emperor of Ocean Park is both a stunning literary achievement and a grand literary entertainment.
Omeros
by Derek WalcottA poem in 7 books, of circular narrative design. Omeros is the Greek name for Homer, invoked here by a Greek girl in exile in America, the invocation marking the beginning of a long journey home, through an intricate web of places, histories and associations, for the poem's characters. Achille and Philoctete are simple fishermen, but they and their tribulations take on the specific gravity and resonance of their mythic Greek counterparts.