Every family has a story and each story is a history to be passed on to those who follow. Sometimes a family surviving and thriving rests on decisive action or just plain luck during critical events. This true story shares the challenges of a young African American family as they are forced to become participants in the Great Migration of Black folks out the South in the early 1950s. In this, his first book, the author narrates his family's journey north and ultimately settling in Iowa. Accompanying the book narration are 17 paintings by the author. The colorful paintings, in primitive folk art style, convey a warmth that invites one into situations that can be unsettling, but true to the lived experience of many families. This book will inspire the reader to do their own research and document their family's history and unique stories for current and future generations and not allow them to be lost in time.
In 1974, middle-schooler Mary Barr and a dozen of her friends boys and girls, black and white sat for a photograph on a porch in Evanston, Illinois. Barr s book, both history and ethnography, emerges from her thinking about this photograph and its deep background. Using government documents, newspaper articles, and census data, Barr provides a history of Evanston with a particular emphasis on its neighborhoods, its schools, and its families. Barr also tracked down all of the living people in her photograph and interviewed them about their experiences in Evanston and beyond. Ultimately, Barr comes to better understand the stories and the lies people tell about their communities, as well as the ways that inequality begets inequality, both in a historical sense and in the daily lives of her far-flung friends. "
After lunch at a very crowded jazz cafe, a boy and his Auntie Nina are inspired to create a feast of their own with such treats as Thelonious Monk Fish and Nat King Cole Slaw.
Enjoy a trip through historic Evanston. See how Davis Street and Sherman and Orrington Avenues appeared around the beginning of the 20th century. Learn how Fountain Square has evolved and how the Merrick Rose Garden is connected. See Northwestern University as it was founded, along with early Evanston's lakefront, city hall, library, and post office. Many of the buildings shown in this book are still standing, while others have been demolished. In some postcard views the stately elm trees of later decades are seen as saplings. The Library Plaza Hotel, North Shore Hotel, and Georgian Hotel are here as well, along with the historic schools, churches, train depots, and, of course, Grosse Point Lighthouse, which all helped shape the city in its formative years.
Translated from the French by Benjamin Ivry, Simone Weil was one of the twentieth century's most original philosopher-critics, and as a result her legacy has been claimed by many. This memoir by Weil's niece is strong-willed and incisive and as close as we are likely to get to the real Simone Weil. Born into a freethinking Jewish family, Weil contributed many articles to Socialist and Communist journals and was active in the Spanish Civil War until her health failed. In 1940 she became strongly attracted to Roman Catholicism and the Passion of Christ. Most of her works, published posthumously, continue to inform debates in ethics, philosophy, and spirituality surrounding questions of sacrifice, asceticism, and the virtues of manual labor. Massively influential, Weil's writings were widely praised by such readers as Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Pope John XXIII, Czeslaw Milosz, and Susan Sontag. Sylvie Weil recovers the deeply Jewish nature of Simone's thinking and details how her preoccupations with charity and justice were fully in the tradition of tzedakah, the Jewish religious obligation toward these actions. Using previously unpublished family correspondence and conversations, Sylvie Weil offers a more authentically personal portrait of her aunt than previous biographers have provided. At Home with Andr and Simone Weil illuminates Simone's relationship to her family, especially to her brother, the great Princeton mathematician Andr Weil. A clear-eyed and uncompromising memoir of her family, At Home with Andr and Simone Weil is a fresh look at the noted French philosopher, mystic, and social activist.
Winner of the Newbery Medal, Coretta Scott King Author Award, and Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature! Perfect for fans of Raina Telgemeier and Gene Luen Yang, New Kid is a timely, honest graphic novel about starting over at a new school where diversity is low and the struggle to fit in is real, from award-winning author-illustrator Jerry Craft. Seventh grader Jordan Banks loves nothing more than drawing cartoons about his life. But instead of sending him to the art school of his dreams, his parents enroll him in a prestigious private school known for its academics, where Jordan is one of the few kids of color in his entire grade. As he makes the daily trip from his Washington Heights apartment to the upscale Riverdale Academy Day School, Jordan soon finds himself torn between two worlds—and not really fitting into either one. Can Jordan learn to navigate his new school culture while keeping his neighborhood friends and staying true to himself? This middle grade graphic novel is an excellent choice for tween readers, including for summer reading. New Kid is a selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List. Plus don't miss Jerry Craft's Class Act!
Henry Coxton, a fledgling occult detective with one too many secrets of his own, has recently taken up stewardship of a ghost finding firm in the heart of Edwardian London. Along with his friends and associates, Violet Asquith (a telekinetic with a mysterious and troubled past) and Christopher X (a difficult but amiable monster), Henry must work to solve the agency’s most terrifying case. Secrets from the pasts of all three detectives begin to surface and threaten the group’s bond of friendship, as well as—it would seem—the very fabric of reality. Strongly influenced by the weird fictions of Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany and M.R. James, The Ghost Finders explores the darkest corners of London’s occult realities.
Pulitzer Prize Finalist | New York Times Bestseller | A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick | A New York Times Book Review Notable Book | TIME Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post; O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Refinery29, and Buzzfeed From Ann Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth, comes a powerful, richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are. At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures. Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.
The first survey of the classic twentieth-century houses that defined American Midwestern modernism. Famed as the birthplace of that icon of twentieth-century architecture, the skyscraper, Chicago also cultivated a more humble but no less consequential form of modernism--the private residence. Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-75 explores the substantial yet overlooked role that Chicago and its suburbs played in the development of the modern single-family house in the twentieth century. In a city often associated with the outsize reputations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the examples discussed in this generously illustrated book expand and enrich the story of the region's built environment. Authors Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino survey dozens of influential houses by architects whose contributions are ripe for reappraisal, such as Paul Schweikher, Harry Weese, Keck & Keck, and William Pereira. From the bold, early example of the "Battledeck House" by Henry Dubin (1930) to John Vinci and Lawrence Kenny's gem the Freeark House (1975), the generation-spanning residences discussed here reveal how these architects contended with climate and natural setting while negotiating the dominant influences of Wright and Mies. They also reveal how residential clients--typically middle-class professionals, progressive in their thinking--helped to trailblaze modern architecture in America. Though reflecting different approaches to site, space, structure, and materials, the examples in Modern in the Middle reveal an abundance of astonishing houses that have never been collected into one study--until now.
