Cultural & Regional

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a modern American classic....

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine....

Father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, Alex Dumas has become, through his son's books, the model for a captivating modern protagonist: The wronged man in search of justice....

Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner Taraji P. Henson reads her inspiring and funny book about family, friends, the hustle required to make it from DC to Hollywood....

"My name is 'J' and I'm awkward--and Black. Someone once told me those were the two worst things anyone could be."....

James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil-rights movement with his eloquent manifesto....

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Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning....

The phenomenal true story of the Black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space....

In the tradition of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Alice Taylor’s To School Through the Fields, Tom Phelan’s We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s....

An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships - and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom....

Jimmy O. Yang is a stand-up comedian, film and TV actor and fan favorite as the character Jian Yang from the popular HBO series Silicon Valley....

Before she turned 20, Cupcake Brown survived the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, and much more....

Raised in the ghetto, abandoned as a child, addicted to drugs and women all his life but still able to produce four consecutive number one hip-hop albums in a row...this is the life and times of the darkest and most dangerously introspective hip-hop artist ever....

The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship....

The Color of Water touches listeners of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son....

His second major venture into nonfiction (after Death in the Afternoon, 1932), Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal....

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the 20th century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic....

Rain of Gold is a true-life saga of love, family and destiny that pulses with bold vitality, sweeping from the war-ravaged Mexican mountains of Pancho Villa's revolution to the days of Prohibition in California....

A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family....

A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian-American consciousness and the struggle to be human....

This best-selling book reveals the extraordinary life of Dr. Ben Carson - from inner-city kid to renowned neurosurgeon....

Abandoned at 10 years old by a mother who chose her drug-addicted, abusive boyfriend, Danielle was raised by grandparents who thought their child-rearing days had ended in the 1960s. She grew up Black, weird, and overwhelmingly uncool in a mostly white neighborhood in upstate New York....

After a decade as a political speechwriter, Sarah Hurwitz decided to apply her skills as a communicator to writing a book...about Judaism. And no one is more surprised than she is....

The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon....

As we confront questions of social inequality, there's no better time to revisit the lessons of the '60s and no better leader to learn from than Congressman John Lewis....

Whether he's initiating a coup d'état against new regulations with the residents, or forging a bond with the 98-year-old who once called him a fat slut, Pope Lonergan's work is infinitely varied. This no-holds-barred account shows what life inside a care home is really like, for both residents and carers. Featuring night-time drama, incontinence pads and the uniquely dark humour of one double-amputee Alzheimer's patient, here you can learn everything you ever wanted to know (and a few things you probably really didn't) about Britain's care system.

In the overheated debate about immigration, we often lose sight of the humanity at the heart of this complex issue. The immigrants and refugees living precariously in the United States are mothers and fathers, children, neighbors, and friends. Individuals propelled by hope and fear, they gamble their lives on the promise of America, yet their voices are rarely heard.

 A collection of publicly available writings, speeches and interviews by Steve Bantu Biko in the seminal time of the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s. These are collated into audio to give Biko a voice in these modern times that so desperately needs to listen to him. Biko's words are not only prophetic but also show the importance of deep socio-philosophical thought that is rooted in actual praxis to solve lived realities.

You may not know his name. Aubrey was a modest man, a gentleman-scholar who cared far more for the preservation of history than for his own legacy. But he was a passionate collector, an early archaeologist and the inventor of modern biography. With all the wit, charm and originality that characterises her subject, Ruth Scurr has seamlessly stitched together John Aubrey's own words to tell his life story and a captivating history of 17th-century England unlike any other.

Sadia Azmat has many different sides to her, she is the good Muslim sister and the loud and proud comedian, she is the quiet and loving friend and the horny and outspoken one. So why does everyone put her in a box and expect her to choose between one or the other? In a life of ups and downs, swings and roundabouts, Sadia has learnt the hard way that she can embrace her sexuality and be a proud British-Indian Muslim.

Within the stoned soul picnic of Black music icons in the ’60s and ’70s, only one could bill himself without a blush as Moses, demanding liberation for Black men with his notions of life and self—Isaac Lee Hayes Jr., the beautifully sheen, shaded, and chain-spangled acolyte of cool, whose high-toned “lounge music” and proto-rap was soul’s highest order—heard on twenty-two albums and selling millions of records. 

Today he is known as Dr. Q, an internationally renowned neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who leads cutting-edge research to cure brain cancer. But not too long ago, he was Freddy, a 19-year-old undocumented migrant worker toiling in the fields of Central California. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa tells his amazing life story - from his impoverished childhood in the tiny village of Palaco, Mexico, to his harrowing border crossing and his transformation from illegal immigrant to American citizen and gifted student at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard Medical School. 

I Too Am America examines the promise and peril of Black men and boys in America by exploring the lives of two talented young men, one in Detroit and one in Oakland, who at once embody all that we want our boys to be while also illuminating the many uncertainties they face. The book delves into the story of CBMA founder Shawn Dove, who had to navigate similar waters of promise and peril decades ago as a Black boy in New York City. 

Dad was many things. He was a business owner, a brick mason, a husband, and a father. He was also illiterate. My dad grew up biracial in the Jim Crow South during the early 1930s, where he struggled to find his identity in a world where he was too Black to be White and too White to be Black. In Mixed Bloodlines, Octavia Yvonne Webb picks up the mantle of her father’s story, exploring the seemingly insurmountable injustices he suffered as a child of mixed race growing up in a racially separated world.

Together with My Cousin & Me: And Other Animals plus Wolves: Ryders in the Whirlwind, this book comprises a trilogy, I call The Land. They tell the epic story of four generations of a Celtic family battling the elements and the animals to scrape a living from a land with no fat and little lean. Ours was a wilderness farm in Central Ontario populated by animals, insects, and rocks. The early generations killed the animals and fought the land.