Ntozake Shange’s classic, award-winning play encompassing the wide-ranging experiences of Black women, now with introductions by two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and Broadway director Camille A. Brown. From its inception in California in 1974 to its Broadway revival in 2022, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country for nearly fifty years. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be a woman of color in the 20th century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing…every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Now with new introductions by Jesmyn Ward and Broadway director Camille A. Brown, and one poem not included in the original, here is the complete text of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
Among the surfeit of narratives about Arabs that have been published in recent years, surprisingly little has been reported on Arabs in America -- an increasingly relevant issue. This book is the most powerful approach imaginable: it is the story of the last forty-plus years of American history, told through the eyes of Arab Americans. It begins in 1963, before major federal legislative changes seismically transformed the course of American immigration forever. Each chapter describes an event in U.S. history -- which may already be familiar to us -- and invites us to live that moment in time in the skin of one Arab American. The chapters follow a timeline from 1963 to the present, and the characters live in every corner of this country. These are dramatic narratives, describing the very human experiences of love, friendship, family, courage, hate, and success. There are the timeless tales of an immigrant community becoming American, the nostalgia for home, the alienation from a society sometimes as intolerant as its laws are generous. A Country Called Amreeka's snapshots allow us the complexity of its characters' lives with an impassioned narrative normally found in fiction. Read separately, the chapters are entertaining and harrowing vignettes; read together, they add a new tile to the mosaic of our history. We meet fellow Americans of all creeds and colors, among them the Alabama football player who navigates the stringent racial mores of segregated Birmingham, where a church bombing wakes a nation to the need to make America a truly more equal place; the young wife from Ramallah -- now living in Baltimore -- who had to abandon her beautiful home and is now asked by a well-meaning American, "How do you like living in an apartment after living in a tent?"; the Detroit toughs and the potsmoking suburban teenagers, who in different decades become politicized and serious about their heritage despite their own wills; the homosexual man afraid to be gay in the Arab world and afraid to be Arab in America; the two formidable women who wind up working for opposing campaigns in the 2000 presidential election; the Marine fighting in Iraq who meets villagers who ask him, "What are you, an Arab, doing here?" We glimpse how America sees Arabs as much as how Arabs see America. We revisit the 1973 oil embargo that initiated the American perception of all Arabs as oil-rich sheikhs; the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis that heralded the arrival of Middle Eastern Islam in the American consciousness; bombings across three decades in Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, and New York City that bring terrorism to American soil; and both wars in Iraq that have posed Arabs as the enemies of America. In a post-9/11 world, Arabic names are everywhere in America, but our eyes glaze over them; we sometimes don't know how to pronounce them or understand whence they come. A Country Called Amreeka gives us the faces behind those names and tells the story of a community it has become essential for us to understand. We can't afford to be oblivious.
There are many untold stories of "broken" celebrities who lose everything after being at an all-time high. Many never recover from the mental distress that comes along with their fame. However, Clarence is the epitome of finding the diamond through the mud.
Shortlisted for the SABEW Best in Business Book Awards Winner of the 2022 AAMBC Literary Award for Non-Fiction/Self Help Book of the Year A breakdown of the economic and social injustices facing Black people and other marginalized citizens inspired by political activist Kimberly Jones' viral video, “How Can We Win.” “So if I played four hundred rounds of Monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made, and then for fifty years, every time that I played, if you didn't like what I did, you got to burn it like they did in Tulsa and like they did in Rosewood, how can you win? How can you win?" When Kimberly Jones declared these words amid the protests spurred by the murder of George Floyd, she gave a history lesson that in just over six minutes captured the economic struggles of Black people in America. Within days the video had been viewed by millions of people around the world, riveted by Jones’s damning—and stunningly succinct—analysis of the enduring disparities Black Americans face. In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for Reconstruction 2.0, a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions—those restitutions promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than 150 years. And, most of all, Jones delivers strategies for how we can effect change as citizens and allies while nurturing ourselves—the most valuable asset we have—in the fight against a system that is still rigged.
By day, Lena Morrison is an ambitious grant writer. By night, she's an escort to some of Chicago's most successful men. Sex isn't on the menu–Lena's job is to provide her elite clients with comanionship and sparkling conversation. She enjoys the extra income, but even more, Lena loves the empowering feeling of being appreciated for her beauty and her brains. When tycoon Roderick Brand hires Lena as his date for a private party, their electric attraction leads to the most erotic night of her life. Incredible as the experience is, she vows not to mix work and pleasure again. But Roderick is relentless. His irresistible proposal: three weeks fulfilling all his fantasies, in exchange for a million–dollar grant that will guarantee Lena a major promotion. Lena can play that game. She'll give him the hottest, wildest sex he's ever had, then she'll walk away, leaving him aching for more. But when it comes to desire, rules–and hearts– are easily broken. And the best–laid plans have a way of working out in ways neither could expect….
An eye-opening response to Aldous Huxley’s widely influential work on psychedelics, physical reality, and consciousness What exactly are hallucinations? Are they actually doors to another reality? Anthony Peake thinks so. In this stunning book, he takes Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and updates it using the latest information from quantum mechanics, neurochemistry, and consciousness studies. Most human beings perceive the doors of perception as being securely closed. But here, Peake analyzes the concept of ‘the scale of transcendence’ and suggests there is a scale of perceptions whereby the doors are slowly opened, bit by bit, to reveal the true nature of reality. For ‘normal’ people, glimpses of this reality—what the Gnostics called ‘The Pleroma’—are experienced during ‘noetic’ experiences. However, for others, the doors are prized open by certain neurological processes starting with migraine and progressing through various altered states such as temporal lobe epilepsy, bipolar syndrome, autism, and schizophrenia. A pioneering work on the relationship between physical reality and consciousness, Opening the Doors of Perception suggests that man can, indeed, perceive reality in its true glory.
Dr. Catherine Cordell, recovering from a brutal attack and hiding her fear behind a mask of professionalism, is the only one that can stop a psychotic killer known as "The Surgeon," due to his horrific methods of murder, before he kills again. 100,000 first printing.
This essential text unpacks major transformations in the study of learning and human development and provides evidence for how science can inform innovation in the design of settings, policies, practice, and research to enhance the life path, opportunity and prosperity of every child. The ideas presented provide researchers and educators with a rationale for focusing on the specific pathways and developmental patterns that may lead a specific child, with a specific family, school, and community, to prosper in school and in life. Expanding key published articles and expert commentary, the book explores a profound evolution in thinking that integrates findings from psychology with biology through sociology, education, law, and history with an emphasis on institutionalized inequities and disparate outcomes and how to address them. It points toward possible solutions through an understanding of and addressing the dynamic relations between a child and the contexts within which he or she lives, offering all researchers of human development and education a new way to understand and promote healthy development and learning for diverse, specific youth regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or history of adversity, challenge, or trauma. The book brings together scholars and practitioners from the biological/medical sciences, the social and behavioral sciences, educational science, and fields of law and social and educational policy. It provides an invaluable and unique resource for understanding the bases and status of the new science, and presents a roadmap for progress that will frame progress for at least the next decade and perhaps beyond.
Carell Augustus is a genius. --Karamo Brown A visionary photography book that brings together the best of classic Hollywood with today's iconic Black entertainers for an immersive experience unlike anything you've ever seen before. Features a foreword by Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker and an afterword by beloved entertainer Niecy Nash! Black Hollywood is a groundbreaking reimagining of Hollywood's most beloved films, including Breakfast at Tiffany's, Singin' in the Rain, Mission: Impossible, Forrest Gump, and more. Visionary photographer Carell Augustus has created a who's who of today's Black entertainers recreating iconic cinematic scenes, renewing readers' appreciation of the past while asking questions about representation in media and inspiring the artists of the future. Compiled over the course of more than ten years and highlighting more than sixty-five stars such as Vanessa L. Williams, Dulé Hill, Karamo Brown, Shermar Moore, and others, Carell Augustus says, Black Hollywood is not just a book for Black people--it's a book for all people about Black people. About the dreams we were never told we could achieve. About the places we were never told we could go. And now, finally, about how we can get there.
