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"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...
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"In How to Be, Adam Nicolson takes us on a glorious, immersive journey. Grounded in the belief that places give access to minds, however distant and strange, this book reintroduces us to our earliest thinkers through the lands they inhabited. To know the mental occupations of Homer or Heraclitus, one must visit their cities, sail their seas, and find landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed but retain the atmosphere of that ancient...
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"Personal essays about the author's family woven together with cultural history and critique about the Great Migration to Chicago, Northern segregation, the life and work of Richard Wright and other Black Chicago intellectuals, Black masculinity, and the specter of violence in Chicago"--
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"Chronicling two-hundred years of glamour, intrigue, and hedonism, this rich and vivid history of the French Riviera features a vast cast of characters, from Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel to Andre Matisse and James Baldwin. 1835, Lord Brougham founded Cannes, introducing bathing and the manicured lawn to the wilds of the Mediterranean coast. Today, much of that shore has become a concrete mass from which escape is an exclusive dream. In the 185 years...
5) Austral
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"Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a perpetual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her manuscript is a series of interconnected accouncts of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover...
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"A brilliantly constructed popular history of the world careening toward the Second World War, as told through the love lives of some of the most famous and fascinating figures of the era. As the Roaring Twenties wind down, the great minds of the time have their minds on other concerns besides art and war. Jean-Paul Sartre waits anxiously in a Parisian café for his first date with Simone de Beauvoir, who stands him up. Marlene Dietrich slips from...
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"Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez reveals her experience as the U.S. born daughter of immigrants and what happened when, at fifteen, her parents were forced back to Mexico in this galvanizing yet tender memoir. Born to Mexican immigrants south of the Rillito River in Tucson, Arizona, Elizabeth had the world at her fingertips as she entered her freshman year of high school as the number one student. But suddenly, Elizabeth's own country took away the...
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"A history of the British thinkers who developed the Enlightenment-era ideas and ideals that drove the American Revolution"--
The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy--and contested--as...
9) Gospel
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From acclaimed scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., GOSPEL explores Black spirituality through sermon and song. From the blues to hip-hop, African Americans have been the driving force of sonic innovation for over a century.
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"A look at life in contemporary Palestine through the lens of its literary culture Marcello Di Cintio first visited Palestine in 1999 and, like most outsiders, the Palestinian narrative he knew was one defined by unending struggle, a near-Sisyphean curse of stories of oppression, exile, and occupation told over and over again. In the summer of 2014, during a brief lull in the bombing from Israel's Operation Protective Edge, photos emerged of a young...
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"Ethel Smyth (b. 1858): Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Victorian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed suffragette. Rebecca Clarke (b. 1886): The talented violist and Pre-Raphaelite beauty and one of the first women ever hired by a professional orchestra, later celebrated for her modernist experimentation. Dorothy Howell (b. 1898): A prodigy who shot to fame at the 1919 Proms, her popularity as...
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An absorbing group biography revealing how exiles from war-torn France brought surrealism to America, sparking the movement that became abstract expressionism. In 1957 the American artist Robert Motherwell made an unexpected claim: "I have only known two painting milieus well...the Parisian Surrealists, with whom I began painting seriously in New York in 1940, and the native movement that has come to be known as 'abstract expressionism,' but which...
14) It's all Greek to me: from Homer to the Hippocratic Oath, how ancient Greece has shaped our world
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"An informative, smart, and very amusing narrative about how influential Greeks and Greek culture have been on the rest of the world, from art to architecture to literature to politics to love"--Provided by publisher.
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"In 146 BC, Greece yielded to the military might of the Roman Republic; sixty years later, when Athens and other Greek city-states rebelled against Rome, the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla destroyed the city of Socrates and Plato, laying waste to the famous Academy where Aristotle had studied. However, the traditions of Greek cultural life continued to flourish during the centuries of Roman rule that followed-in the lives and work of a distinguished...