Showing results by narrator "J. D. Jackson" in All Categories

A pioneering neuroscientist shares his story of growing up in one of Miami's toughest neighborhoods and how it led him to his groundbreaking work in drug addiction. As a youth, Carl Hart didn't realize the value of school; he studied just enough to stay on the basketball team. At the same time, he was immersed in street life. Today he is a cutting-edge neuroscientist - Columbia University's first tenured African American professor in the sciences.

One of the most important writers to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes may be best known as a poet, but these stories showcase his talent as a lively storyteller. His work blends elements of blues and jazz, speech and song, into a triumphant and wholly original idiom.

Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the Black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries? In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding Black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of Blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer Black college graduates than would otherwise exist.

We Are the Change We Seek is a collection of Barack Obama's 26 greatest addresses: beginning with his 2002 speech opposing the Iraq War and closing with his final speech before the United Nations in September 2016. As president, Obama's words had the power to move the country, and often the world, as few presidents before him.

Joe's body is failing him. In order to make his last weeks of life more palatable, he goes into full digital immersion. This new process will allow him to play in a virtual environment with a fake but healthy and strong virtual body. As soon as he steps into this new environment he meets his virtual assistant, an Evolving Intelligence (E.I.), who takes the form of someone close to him. But before Joe and Spooky can begin playing the game, they are both summoned to a reality where magic is real.

Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit's standards: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams? If you're Detective Versado's geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you're desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story.

Heaven may not be what you think it is. We often think of heaven in two extremes: It's either a dreamy existence where we float around on clouds with nothing much to do, or it's something far off in the future that we don't want to happen until we accomplish all that we want to in this life. Both of these are flat wrong, and Tony Evans looks to scripture to set the record straight. Simple and straight forward, Eternity is a short book on what eternity with God will really be like.

Spanning more than 200 years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism.

This anthology edited by the American writer, philosopher, and patron of the arts Alain Locke brings together some of the most influential pieces of African American works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Featuring the voices of Zora Neale Thurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes, Locke included commentary on the emergence of the New Negro Movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance. The New Negro is considered to be the definitive text on the movement.

At a young age, Lil J. Skin started stealing pain pills from his mom whenever he started to feel stressed - but now he's graduated to the big leagues. After Lil J. partners with a pusher named Rico on a sweet deal, events take a shocking turn when the buyer - an undercover police officer - is shot and Lil J. winds up wounded and hiding in a crack house.

Langston Brown is running out of time and options for clearing his name and escaping death row. Wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Mother's Day Massacre, he prepares to face his death. His final hope for salvation lies with his daughter, Liza, an artist who dreamed of a life of music and song but left the prestigious Juilliard School to pursue a law degree with the intention of clearing her father's name.

Drawing on the entrepreneurial life lessons Taulbert learned from his uncle Cleve, Who Owns the Ice House? chronicles Taulbert’s journey from life in the Mississippi Delta at the height of legal segregation to being recognized by Time magazine as "one of our nation’s most outstanding emerging entrepreneurs". Who Owns the Ice House? reaches into the past to remind us of the timeless and universal principles that can empower anyone to succeed.

Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or “the new Jim Crow.” Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended altogether?

Pittsburgh, 1995. The son of a black father he’s never known and a white mother he sometimes wishes he didn’t, 22-year-old Bobby Saraceno is passing for white. Raised by his bigoted maternal grandfather, Bobby has hidden his truth from everyone, even his best friend and fellow comic-book geek, Aaron, who has just returned home from prison a hardened racist.

When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules—a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.

Exploring the creative process of an American original, the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures series will uncover the hidden history behind the author’s best known novels...and his most mysterious and ambitious unfinished works. In this second volume, Beau L’Amour examines how his father made the transition from struggling pulp writer to successful novelist and uses his father’s notes, journal entries, and correspondence to continue the process of seeking out how and why many of these never-before-seen manuscripts were written.

Essence best-selling authors of Love Don’t Live Here Anymore, the husband/wife team of Chiles and Millner use a dramatic “he said, she said” approach in a novel that carries listeners right into the hearts of two lifelong friends. Aaron and Nina grew up on the same street and have been best buddies for 25 years. Now they wonder if they might ruin their relationship if they make room in it for passion and romance.

Andre Anderson is a Black teenager with a dream. Although he loves to play basketball and laugh with his friends, he also loves to write and wants to make his mark on the world. One summer when he is assigned to do a magazine article about race, he creates a passionate and explosive piece. Soon, he is the target of racists who brutally attack him, putting him in the hospital. With his hand and dream broken, he must figure out how to put his life back together in spite of the anger and injustice he now sees around him.

The Civil War is over, though for Jupiter Smith, a former slave and Union soldier, many battles still lie ahead. He returns to the plantation he worked on before the war in search of his woman but rather finds his old master gone mad, haunting the ruins like a ghost. Out of pity for the now mentally ill colonel, Jupiter strangles him and heads west to seek a new life in San Francisco.

Emmitt Smith, the NFL’s all-time leading rusher of the Dallas Cowboys, Dancing with the Stars champion, and successful real-estate investor, outlines the principles that helped him become a winner on and off the football field.