Showing titles in Cultural & Regional

The culmination of a unique achievement in modern American literature: the six volumes of autobiography that began more than thirty years ago with the appearance of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. A Song Flung Up to Heaven opens as Maya Angelou returns from Africa to the United States to work...

An Economist, GQ and Times Book of the Year 2025 An ambitious history of masculinity and family, from the Bronze Age to the modern day, Fatherhood dares to offer a more caring and affirmative vision of the roles men currently play in society. 'Superbly intelligent . . . a rewarding Sapiens-style...

She Who Tastes, Knows is an expansive history of Durkhanai's homeland and a vivid, moving story about what it truly means to understand another's culture. Through stories of food, family, belonging and migration, the book traverses cultural boundaries, weaving a tapestry of dignity, empathy and understanding.

This mesmerizing companion book to the award-winning film, The Butler traces the Civil Rights Movement and explores crucial moments of twentieth century American history through the eyes of Eugene Allen—a White House butler who served eight presidents over the course of thirty-four years...

This powerful memoir about a Hmong family’s epic journey to safety is a profound “testament to the miraculous strength of women and the indomitable resolve of the human spirit” (Cristina Henríquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans). Born in 1961 in war-torn Laos, Tswb’s childhood...

In a deeply personal investigation, award-winning journalist Sadiya Ansari takes us across three continents and back a century as she seeks the truth behind a family secret. Why did her grandmother Tahira abandon her seven children to follow a man from Karachi to a tiny village in Punjab? And though she eventually left him, Tahira remained estranged from her children for nearly two decades. Who was she in those years when she was no longer a wife or mother?

The definitive biography of one of the most courageous women in American history "reveals Harriet Tubman to be even more remarkable than her legend" (Newsday). Celebrated for her exploits as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has entered history as one of nineteenth-century...

Over one night, alone in the Punta della Dogana Museum in Venice, Leïla Slimani grapples with the self as it is revealed in solitude. In a place of old and new, she confronts her past and her present, through her life as a Moroccan woman, as a writer, and as a daughter. Surrounded by art, she explores what it means to behold and clasp beauty; enveloped by night, she confronts the meaning of life and death.

A probing biography of world-renowned Jewish singer and actor Al Jolson and the history of his performance in and the making of The Jazz Singer Al Jolson, born Asa Yoelson, immigrated from a shtetl in Lithuania to the United States in 1894 after his father secured a job as a rabbi in Washington...

The second and concluding volume of Noël Coward's legendary autobiography includes Future Indefinite and the unfinished Past Unconditional. With his trademark wit, Coward delivers anecdotes about his travels in South America, Hollywood encounters with an array of contemporary stars and directors, and his later theatrical successes, including the Broadway triumph of Design For Living.

Harriet Tubman is one of the giants of American history - a fearless visionary who led scores of her fellow slaves to freedom and battled courageously behind enemy lines during the Civil War. And yet in the century since her death, next to nothing has been written about this extraordinary woman aside from juvenile biographies. The truth about Harriet Tubman has become lost inside a legend woven of racial and gender stereotypes.

As the daughter of a white Welsh-speaking mother and black father from Guyana, Charlotte Williams's childhood world was one of mixed messages dominated by the feeling that 'somehow to be half-Welsh and half Afro-Caribbean was to be half of something but never quite anything whole at all.' Sugar and Slate tells the fascinating story of her journey of self-discovery, from the small north Wales town of her birth to Africa, the Caribbean and back to Wales.

Winner of the 2024 American Legacy Book Award in Christian Inspirational A critically acclaimed #1 New York Times bestseller with more than one million copies in print and a major motion picture! Gritty with pain, betrayal, and brutality, this incredible true story also shines with an unexpected...

A heartfelt, one-of-a-kind memoir chronicling the hilarious, absurd, and thought-provoking experiences of an American pursuing comedy in China, learning first-hand how humor does and doesn’t translate—and whether laughter transcends borders. I marched onstage in a long robe beside my Shifu...

Question: What do you do when the kitchen wall collapses into the vat of beans being cooked for a horde of hungry schoolboys? Answer: You serve it up anyway! Why let a few lumps of clay and the odd metal screw spoil a decent meal? When Bunmi Asaolu arrived at the grand gates of St. John/Mary's Unity Secondary School (SAJOMACO) as a first-year student, you'd be forgiven for assuming he was swapping life on the serene university campus he grew up on for another of equal civility. Wrong! Behind the gates of SAJOMACO lay a world of contradictions.

Debra Dank had long been desperate to visit the National Archives, to paint a fuller picture of her family, to add flesh to the name-bones and the few precious stories she possessed. What she discovered would shatter everything she thought she knew about her family and her past. She had been aware of her father's five siblings, some of whom had died before she could come to know them, but there were always whispers and gaps and silences.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas and their fifty-year sisterhood, a legacy erased from history—until now. “This is the kind of history I wish...

*Now a major motion picture—Rob Peace—starring Jay Will, Mary J. Blige, and Chiwetel Ejiofor* *Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, and more* The New York Times bestselling account of a young African-American man who escaped Newark, NJ, to...

Before Adam Farrer’s family relocated to Withernsea in 1992, he’d never heard of the Holderness coast. The move represented one thing to Adam: a chance to leave the insecurities of early adolescence behind. And he could do that anywhere. What he didn’t know was how much he’d grow to love the quirks and people of this faded Yorkshire resort, in spite of its dilapidated attractions and retreating clifftops. While Adam documents the minutiae of small-town life, he lays bare experiences that are universal.

In 1982, Sally Morgan travelled back to her grandmother's birthplace. What started as a tentative search for information about her family, turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. My Place is a moving account of a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.