10/06/2019
Book Title: Between The World and Me
Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Book synopsis: What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
You can find this book with the link below and at other bookstores and websites.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SEFAIRI/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
06/06/2019
Book Title: Monster
Author: Walter Dean Myers
Book synopsis: This New York Times bestselling novel from acclaimed author Walter Dean Myers tells the story of Steve Harmon, a teenage boy in juvenile detention and on trial. Presented as a screenplay of Steve's own imagination, and peppered with journal entries, the book shows how one single decision can change our whole lives.
You can find this book with the link below and at other bookstores and websites.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B001MYJ3JM?ref=aw_sitb_digital-text
31/05/2019
Book Title: The Color Purple
Author: Alice Walker
Book synopsis: Published to unprecedented acclaim, The Color Purple established Alice Walker as a major voice in modern fiction. This is the story of two sisters—one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South—who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic novel of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life.
You can find this book with the link below and at other bookstores and websites.
https://www.amazon.com/Color-Purple-Alice-Walker/dp/0156028352 -view_1559229552952
30/05/2019
Book Title: The Fire Next Time
Author: James Baldwin
Book synopsis: A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.
You can find this book with the link below and at other bookstores and websites.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EGMV00W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
28/05/2019
Book Title: PowerNomics
Author: Dr. Claude Anderson
Book synopsis: PowerNomics: The National Plan to Empower Black America is a five-year plan to make Black America a prosperous and empowered race that is self-sufficient and competitive as a group by the year 2005. In this book, Dr. Anderson obliterates the myths and illusions of black progress and brings together data and information from many different sources to construct a framework for solutions to the dilemma of Black America. In PowerNomics: The National Plan, Dr. Anderson proposes new principles, strategies and concepts that show blacks a new way to see, think, and behave in race matters. The new mind set prepares blacks to take strategic steps to create a new reality for their race. It offers guidance to others who support blacks self-sufficiency. In this book, Dr. Anderson offers insightful analysis and action steps blacks can take to redesign core areas of life - Education, Economics, Politics and Religion - to better benefit their race. The action steps in each area require new empowerment tools that Dr. Anderson presents - a new group vision and a new culture of empowerment - tools designed to counter, if not break many of the racial monopolies in society. Vertical integration and Industrializing black communities are other major concepts and strategies that he presents in the book. He places a great deal of importance on building industries in black communities that are constructed upon group competitive advantages.
You can find this book with the link below and at other bookstores and websites.
https://www.amazon.com/PowerNomics-National-Empower-Black-America/dp/0966170229/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=powernomics&qid=1559048057&s=gateway&sr=8-1 #
20/05/2019
Book title: A Raisin In The Sun
Author: Lorraine Hansberry
Book synopsis: "Never before, the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage," observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959.
Indeed Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of black America--and changed American theater forever. The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," which warns that a dream deferred might "dry up/like a raisin in the sun."
You can find this book with the link below and at other bookstores and websites.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005U3Z5MA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
15/05/2019
Title: Invisible Man
Author: Ralph Ellison
Book synopsis: A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
You can find this book with the link below and at other bookstores and websites.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003WUYR9K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
13/05/2019
Title: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Author: Alex Haley
Book synopsis: In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America.
You can find this book with the link below and at bookstores and other websites.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B013ZNNX5C?ref=aw_sitb_digital-text
#1965
10/05/2019
Title: Blood in my Eye
Author: George L. Jackson
Book synopsis: Blood In My Eye was completed only days before it's author was killed. George Jackson died on August 21, 1971 at the hands of San Quentin prison guards during an alleged escape attempt. At eighteen, George Jackson was convicted of stealing seventy dollars from a gas station and was sentenced from one year to life. He was to spent the rest of his life -- eleven years-- in the California prison system, seven in solidary confinement. In prison he read widely and transformed himself into an activist and political theoretician who defined himself as a revolutionary.
You can find this book with the link below and at other bookstores and websites.
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-My-Eye-George-Jackson/dp/0933121237
08/05/2019
Title: Manchild In The Promised Land
Author: Claude Brown
Book synopsis: Published during a literary era marked by the ascendance of black writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alex Haley, this thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown’s childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s.
When the book was first published in 1965, it was praised for its realistic portrayal of Harlem—the children, young people, hardworking parents; the hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and numbers runners; the police; the violence, s*x, and humor.
The book continues to resonate generations later, not only because of its fierce and dignified anger, not only because the struggles of urban youth are as deeply felt today as they were in Brown’s time, but also because of its inspiring message. Now with an introduction by Nathan McCall, here is the story about the one who “made it,” the boy who kept landing on his feet and grew up to become a man.
You can this book with the link below and at other bookstores and websites.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0040JG344?ref=aw_sitb_digital-text
06/05/2019
Title: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Book synopsis: Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either:
It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge is Janie Crawford, who has married three men and been tried for the murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to justify herself to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend, Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf."
You can find this book with the link below and at other bookstores and websites.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MDLQ38N/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
03/05/2019
Title: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Author: Maya Angelou
Book synopsis: Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.
You can find this book with the link below and at other book websites and stores.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0026LTNFO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1