en-US Thu, 15 May 2025 16:54:06 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 216497102 From a blistering new voice in dark literary fiction, an unsettling portrait of loneliness, obsession, and identity which asks: if a stranger was left alone in your house, how well could they truly get to know you—enough to fall in love with you?

Alice and Tom are made for each other. Deeply connected, they share a flat in London, go to galleries together, enjoy the same books and wine. They even share a toothbrush. It’s all picture perfect.

Except Alice and Tom have never met.

Alice has been cleaning Tom’s apartment every Wednesday for a year. With every smudge wiped from his coffee cup, every multivitamin counted in the jar, Alice spirals deeper into infatuation, imagining a love so powerful it might erase a lifetime of self-hatred and loneliness.

But as Alice prepares for the moment when she and Tom will finally meet face-to-face, she discovers that love might not be the cure she thought it was. Instead, their coming together sets off a chain of events that shatters everything Alice thought she knew and burns her world to the ground.

Told in Alice’s compelling, deliciously acidic voice, Creep is a literary study of unreliability and unlikability. Exploring alienation and loneliness, class and race, it's a skilled debut with resonance in the way that we view women, mental health, and the lost in society.]]> 256 Emma van Straaten 0063411016 Johnisha 0 currently-reading 3.50 2025
author: Emma van Straaten
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/15
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]]> 209456186 Vikram Seth and Thrity Umrigar meet Rebecca in this sweeping multi-generational debut novel by accomplished television executive Nayantara Roy, about a young Indian American book editor from Brooklyn who returns to Kolkata when she learns that she has inherited her family’s enormous ancestral home, and the secrets that lie within it.


It’s the summer of 2015, and Lila De is on the verge of a breakthrough in her career as an editor at a prestigious New York publishing house. But when she gets a call from her mother in India, informing her that she’s inherited her family’s sprawling estate, she must confront the legacy of an extended family she thought she left behind sixteen years ago. Returning to Kolkata reunites Lila with her mother after a decade of estrangement, and then there are her grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all of whom still live in the house, all of whom resent her sudden inheritance. To make matters more complicated, her first boyfriend seeks her out when she arrives, and her star author� and occasional lover� is suddenly determined to make things more serious.


As Lila tries to come to terms with both past and present, long-suppressed secrets from her family emerge, culminating in an act of shocking violence, and she must finally reckon with her inherited custom of keeping everything under the surface. For fans of Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes and All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews, The Magnificent Ruins is an utterly addictive read.]]> 448 Nayantara Roy 1643755846 Johnisha 4 3.81 2024
author: Nayantara Roy
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/13
date added: 2025/05/13
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]]> 214185314
Artist, Poet, Actor, Revolutionary, Legend- Tupac Shakur

Tupac Shakur is one of the greatest and most controversial artists of all time. More than a quarter of a century after his tragic death in 1996 at the age of just twenty-five, he continues to be one of the most misunderstood, complicated and prolific figures in modern history. Tupac’s unapologeticĚýlyrics, for which he was villainized by many at the time, read in these pages as prophecy.ĚýĚýHis cry of outrage in a country that repeatedly told Black men and women that their lives did not matter,Ěýcontinues to inspire his fans around the world.ĚýĚý

In Tupac Shakur , author and screenwriter Staci Robinson—who knew Tupac as a young man and who was entrustedĚýby his mother, Afeni Shakur, to write his biography—peels back the myths andĚýunpacks the complexities that have shadowedĚýTupac’s existence. With exclusive access toĚýhisĚýprivate notebooks, letters, unpublished lyrics and uncensored conversations with those who knew and loved him best, Robinson tells a powerful story of a life defined by politics and art, and a man driven by equal parts brilliance and impulsiveness.

It is a story of a mother and son bound together by a love for each other and forĚýtheir people, and the relationship that endured through theirĚýdarkest times. It is a political story that begins in the whirlwind of the 60’s Civil Rights Movement, and takes you through a young artist's awakening to rage and purpose in the nineties era of Rodney King. It is a story of dizzying success and its devastating consequences. And, of course, it is the story of his music, his timeless message that will never die as it continues to touch and inspire past, present and future generations.]]> 448 Staci Robinson 1804946419 Johnisha 3 4.33 2023
author: Staci Robinson
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 3
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]]> 123666828
Artist, poet, actor, revolutionary, legend

Tupac Shakur is one of the greatest and most controversial artists of all time. More than a quarter of a century after his tragic death in 1996 at the age of just twenty-five, he continues to be one of the most misunderstood, complicated, and prolific figures in modern history. Drawing on exclusive access to Tupac’s private notebooks, letters, and uncensored conversations with those who loved and knew him best, this estate-authorized biographyĚýpaintsĚýthe fullest and most intimate picture to date ofĚýthe young man who became a legend for generations to come.

In Tupac Shakur, author and screenwriter Staci Robinson—whoĚýknew Tupac from their shared circle of high school friends in Marin City, California,Ěý˛ą˛Ô»ĺ who was entrusted by his mother, Afeni Shakur, to share his story—unravels the myths and unpacks the complexities that have shadowed Tupac’s existence. Decades in the making, this book pulls back the curtain to reveal a powerful story of a life defined by politics and art—a man driven by equal parts brilliance and impulsiveness, steeped in the rich intellectual tradition of Black empowerment, and unafraid to utter raw truths about race in America.

It is a story of a mother and son bound together by a love for each other and for their people, and the relationship that endured through their darkest times. It is a political story that begins in the whirlwind of the 1960s civil rights movement, and through a young artist’s awakening to rage and purpose in the â€�90s era of Rodney King. It is a story of dizzying success and its devastating consequences. And, of course, it is the story of Tupac’s music, his timeless message that will never die as it continues to touch and inspireĚýus today.]]> 691 Staci Robinson 1524761060 Johnisha 3 4.43 2023
author: Staci Robinson
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/05/06
date added: 2025/05/06
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]]> 231363844 A stunning first novel from universally acclaimed Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose debut short story collection won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Moving from Pakistan’s sophisticated cities to its most rural farmlands, This Is Where the Serpent Lives captures the extraordinary proximity of extreme wealth to extreme poverty in a land where fate is determined by class and social station.

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives paints a powerful portrait of contemporary feudal Pakistan, and a farm on which the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters are linked through violence and love, resilience, and tragedy. From Afra, who rose from abject poverty to the role of trusted servant to an affluent gangster; to Saqib, an errand boy who is eventually trusted to lead his boss’s new farming venture, where he becomes determined to rise above his rank by any means necessary. Saqib’s boss, the wealthy landowner Hisham, reminisces about meeting his wife while she was dating his brother, while Gazala, a young teacher, falls for Saqib and his bold promises for their future before learning about his plans to skim money from the farm’s profits.

ĚýIn matters of both business and the heart, Mueenuddin’s characters struggle to choose between the paths that are moral and the paths that will allow them to survive the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their country.

Intimate and epic, elegiac and profoundly moving, Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives is a tour de force destined to become a classic of contemporary literature.]]> Daniyal Mueenuddin 0525655166 Johnisha 0 to-read 5.00
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]]> 223854728 An urgent pocket guide to Project 2025—the playbook for Trump’s second administration—a decoder for what it says, what it means for your future, and for the future of abortion, LGBTQ rights, undocumented immigrants and more from an award-winning staff writer at The Atlantic.

In the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election, news spread about Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page document published by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. The debates—and anxiety—surrounding this initiative have only increased as authors of the Project assume positions of power in the second Trump administration.

So, what is Project 2025, exactly? Who wrote it, what does it actually say, and what does its mean for everyday Americans, across the political spectrum, in the years to come?

In The Project, award-winning journalist David A. Graham offers much-needed context and distills the essential elements of this sprawling document. Breaking down the Project’s strategy for transforming—and radically empowering—the executive branch, Graham then explains what the architects behind Project 2025 would do with that restoring traditional gender norms and the supremacy of the nuclear family, decimating the civil service, performing mass deportations, reducing corporate regulation and worker protections, and more.

Project 2025 is the intellectual blueprint for the new administration, Graham argues, and its tenets should not be legible only to policy wonks. Authoritative yet highly accessible, The Project demystifies it for those whose lives it will impact most.]]> 160 David A. Graham Johnisha 0 to-read 4.17
author: David A. Graham
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.17
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]]> 211934938 The epic story of Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs—and the defeat of desegregation in the North.

In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why?

In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight—and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy� could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate—and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today.

Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country's promise.]]> 528 Michelle Adams 0374250421 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.24 2025
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average rating: 4.24
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]]> 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 Johnisha 5 3.63 2025
author: Laila Lalami
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/29
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]]> 34467031
‎Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that once belonged to men, now soldiers abroad. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. One evening at a nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.

With the atmosphere of a noir thriller, Egan’s first historical novel follows Anna and Styles into a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers, and union men. Manhattan Beach is a deft, dazzling, propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in the lives and identities of women and men, of America and the world.]]> 438 Jennifer Egan 1476716730 Johnisha 4 3.55 2017
author: Jennifer Egan
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
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]]> 134117313
For years, Cole Arthur RileyĚýwas desperate for a spirituality she could trust. Amid ongoing national racial violence, the isolation of the pandemic, and a surge of anti-Black rhetoric in many Christian spaces, she began dreaming of a more human, more liberating expression of faith.ĚýShe went on to create Black Liturgies, a digital project that connects spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black memory, and the Black body.

In this book, she brings together new prayers, letters, poems, meditation questions,Ěýbreath practices, scriptures, and the writings of Black literaryĚýancestors to offer forty-three liturgies that can be practiced individually or as a community. Inviting readers to reflect on their shared experiences of wonder, rest, rage, and repair, and creating rituals for holidays like Lent and Juneteenth, Arthur Riley writes with a poet’s touch and a sensitivity that has made her one of the most important spiritual voices at work today.

For anyone healing from communities that were more violent than loving; for anyone who has escaped the trauma of white Christian nationalism, religious homophobia, or transphobia; for anyone asking what it means to be human in a world of both beauty and terror, Black Liturgies is a work of healing and empowerment, and a vision for what might be.]]> 336 Cole Arthur Riley 0593593642 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.72
author: Cole Arthur Riley
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.72
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]]> 181865600
A mother and a son. A goddess and a prince. A curse and an oath. A river whose course will change the fate of the world.

Ganga, joyful goddess of the river, serves as caretaker to the mischievous godlings who roam her banks. But when their antics incur the wrath of a powerful sage, Ganga is cursed to become mortal, bound to her human form until she fulfills the obligations of the curse.

Though she knows nothing of mortal life, Ganga weds King Shantanu and becomes a queen, determined to regain her freedom no matter the cost. But in a cruel turn of fate, just as she is freed of her binding, she is forced to leave her infant son behind.

Her son, prince Devavrata, unwittingly carries the legacy of Ganga’s curse. And when he makes an oath that he will never claim his father’s throne, he sets in motion a chain of events that will end in a terrible and tragic war.

As the years unfold, Ganga and Devavrata are drawn together again and again, each confluence another step on a path that has been written in the stars, in this deeply moving and masterful tale of duty, destiny, and the unwavering bond between mother and son.]]> 496 Vaishnavi Patel 035652020X Johnisha 0 to-read 3.77 2024
author: Vaishnavi Patel
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.77
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]]> 215749903 A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland’s most infamous disaster

In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate.

In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Ireland’s overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. The empire’s laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Ireland’s wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empire’s embrace of modern capitalism.

Uncovering the disaster’s roots in Britain’s deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy.]]> 352 Padraic X. Scanlan 1541601548 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.99 2025
author: Padraic X. Scanlan
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.99
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]]> 221805134 In this soulful debut novel set in the hypnotic music scene of New York City, a young woman lands her dream job at a major label—only to discover just how treacherous a place made to birth stars can be.

Growing up, Billie Grand sought solace in music, finding herself in the pulsing beats, striking lyrics, and mesmerizing voices that saved her when money issues and familial strife proved deafening. When she finally lands a coveted A&R assistant role at Lit Music Productions, one of the largest music labels in the country, it initially seems like everything she’s dreamed of—sleek offices, exclusive industry parties, flashy dealmaking—and she can’t wait until it’s her turn to find the next breakout headliner.

But as she continues to work at Lit, she discovers a dark side to all the glamor. The hours are long, the demands are insane, and Billie can’t shake the sense Lit’s higher ups are hiding something about their dealings As Billie tries to sign her first artist, a shake-up threatens to change everything and endangers Billie’s already precarious place in the pecking order. Her love life, family, and friendships have all taken a hit, but Billie has her sights set on the stars. As a reckoning brews at the office and the costs of her dreams get ever higher, she will have to decide—is finding success worth losing herself?

When the Music Hits is a powerful and moving anthem for making space where there was none before, and introduces Amber Oliver as a blazing new talent to watch.]]> 288 Amber Oliver 059387417X Johnisha 0 to-read 4.27 2025
author: Amber Oliver
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.27
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]]> 219833252 Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby returns with King of Ashes, a Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic and dazzling family drama.

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.

Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he’s forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his himself, and his own particular set of skills.

Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything.

Because everything burns.]]> 352 S.A. Cosby 1250832063 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.56 2025
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.56
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]]> 52766909 Virginia Living Favorite book (2021)

In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia's top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a white businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker's death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family's permission or knowledge. The circumstances surrounding his death reflect the long legacy of mistreating African Americans that began more than a century before with cadaver harvesting and worse. It culminated in efforts to win the heart transplant race in the late 1960s.]]> 400 Chip Jones 1982107529 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.74 2020
author: Chip Jones
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 210204151
When kings fall, queens rise.

Nothing about Semiramis's upbringing could have foretold her legacy or the power she would come to wield. A female ruler, once an orphan raised on the outskirts of an empire - certainly no one in Ancient Assyria would bend to her command willingly. Semiramis was a woman who knew if she wanted power, she would have to claim it.

There are whispers of her fame in Mesopotamian myth- Semiramis was a queen, an ambitious warrior, a commander whose reputation reaches the majestic proportions of Alexander the Great. Historical record, on the other hand, falls eerily quiet.

In her second novel, Costanza Casati brilliantly weaves myth and ancient history together to give Semiramis a voice, charting her captivating ascent to a throne no one promised her. The world Casati expertly builds is rich with dazzling detail and will transport her readers to the heat of the Assyrian Empire and a world long gone.]]> 448 Costanza Casati 1464228213 Johnisha 4 4.07 2024
author: Costanza Casati
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/13
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]]> 1226104 336 Barry Meier 1579546382 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.96 2003
author: Barry Meier
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/10
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]]> 214504715 A searing tribute of sisterhood and family, love and profound loss from the acclaimed author of The World According to Fannie Davis.

±ő˛ÔĚýLove, Rita,ĚýBridgett M. Davis tells the story of her beloved older sister, a vivacious woman who in leaving home to attend Fisk University and then becoming a car test driver, an amateur belly dancer, an MBA, and later a popular special ed teacher, modeled for her younger sister Bridgett how to live boldly before her own life was tragically cut short by lupus when she was only forty-four. A brave and beautiful homage that both celebrates the special, complex bond of sisterhood yet also reveals what it is to live, and die, as a Black woman in America.

ĚýThis moving memoir, full of joy and heartbreak, family history and American history, uses Rita’s life as a lens to examine the persistent effects of racism in the lives of Black women—and the men they love; it is essential reading for fans of Jesmyn Ward, Kiese Laymon, James McBride, Linda Villarosa, and Tressie McMillan Cottom.]]> 384 Bridgett M. Davis 0063322080 Johnisha 5 4.56
author: Bridgett M. Davis
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.56
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rating: 5
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date added: 2025/04/05
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This book adroitly explores what it means to be a black woman and a black sister. It really squeezed my heart. A must read. Thank you for bravely sharing your sister’s story, Bridgett, as well as your own!
]]> 222443118
The book commences with a startling premise: What if a former FBI special agent-turned-private investigator had been hired to trail Hoffa in that summer of 1975 and saw him get in a car with three other men, all of whom the investigator knew from his prior experience with the FBI? Would that investigator report what he knew to the FBI when he later learned Hoffa had been abducted—knowing the Mafia's practice of eliminating witnesses to its crimes?

Sam Silver, the former FBI special agent, is that investigator. But he is reluctant to contact the FBI. His only child, a high school student, just lost his mother (and Silver's wife) to cancer, and Sam cannot bear the thought of leaving his son without any parent.

Fast forward eleven years. Sam's son, now a young lawyer in Washington, DC, embarks on an odyssey to determine whether his father's untimely death on a sailboat ten years earlier was, as the coroner determined, an accident. Or was it something more sinister?

In a story filled with unexpected twists and turns, "Legacy of Lies" brings into focus the forces surrounding Hoffa's disappearance—Bobby Kennedy's vendetta against Hoffa when he was Attorney General, President Richard Nixon's bid for re-election in 1972, and, last but not least, the Mafia.

The book has already received praise:

“An intriguing read that revolves around the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa.� � Joseph D. Pistone, former FBI Special Agent and author of the New York Times best-selling book, "Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia"

"Lew Paper, a seasoned historian and acclaimed author, delves into an intricate tapestry of espionage and deceit with his latest masterpiece: "Legacy of Lies." Drawing from his expertise in uncovering the hidden truths behind little-known history, Paper weaves together a gripping narrative that navigates the shadowy corridors of international espionage. Combining a knack for storytelling and meticulous research, he brings to life a world where loyalties are tested and secrets lurk behind every corner. "Legacy of Lies" promises the reader a thrilling journey through a web of deception, where the stakes are high and the so-called truth is a precious and rare commodity. Prepare to be captivated, as Paper masterfully blends a trifecta of suspense, intrigue, and historical insight."
� Amanda M. Fairbanks, author of the critically-acclaimed "The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind"

“Lew Paper shows his knowledge of the germane historical material in an impressive manner; in order to creatively reimagine the details behind Hoffa’s mysterious disappearance, he thoroughly establishes his command of the known facts. [T]he novel offers an engaging look into the world of organized crime over the course of a genuinely unpredictable story. . . .� Kirkus Reviews

“With craftsmanship and style, Lew Paper invites readers to join a fascinating historical journey, filled with suspense, including the mysteries that still swirl around Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance.� � Ted Widmer, best-selling author of "Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington," and Editor, "Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy"

“Lew Paper’s longtime interest in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, coupled with his writing and reporting, has resulted in a fabulous historical thriller that takes us on a journey of �what-ifs� leading up to and beyond the time in July 1975 when Hoffa was picked up in a restaurant parking lot and never seen again. His disappearance has sparked numerous theories, conspiracies, investigations � none of which has ever provided a definitive answer. "Legacy of Lies" explores what might have happened in a fun and entertaining read.�
� Bob Harig, Sports Illustrated, author of "Drive: The Lasting Legacy of Tiger Woods," and "Tiger and Phil: Golf’s Most Fascinating Rivalry]]> 302 Lew Paper 1685127851 Johnisha 4 3.90
author: Lew Paper
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.90
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rating: 4
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]]> 217045791 For readers of All the Light We Cannot See and In Memoriam, a moving and deeply humane story about a trans man who must relinquish the freedoms of prewar Berlin to survive first the Nazis then the Allies while protecting the ones he loves

In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin’s thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond, but everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm. There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation.

In the final days of the war, with their freedom in sight, Bertie and Sofie find a young trans man collapsed on their property, still dressed in Holocaust prison clothes. They vow to protect him—not from the Nazis, but from the Allied forces who are arresting queer prisoners while liberating the rest of the country. Ironically, as the Allies� vise grip closes on Bertie and his family, their only salvation becomes fleeing to the United States.

Brimming with hope, resilience, and the enduring power of community, The Lilac People tells an extraordinary story inspired by real events and recovers an occluded moment of trans history.]]> 320 Milo Todd 1640097031 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.46
author: Milo Todd
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.46
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]]> 216724330 The New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing and Caul Baby returns with an epic, multi-generational novel that illuminates the legacy of slavery and the power of romantic love.

Harlem, 2019. Ardelia and Oliver are hosting their engagement party. As the guests get ready to leave, he hands her a love letter on a yellowing, crumbling piece of paper . . .

Natchez, 1865. Discharged from the Union Army as a free man after the war’s end, Harrison returns to Mississippi to reunite with the woman he loves, Tirzah. Upon his arrival at the Freedmen’s Bureau, though, he catches the eye of a woman working there, who’s determined to thwart his efforts to find his beloved. After tragedy strikes, Harrison resigns himself to a life with her.Ěý

Meanwhile in Louisiana, the newly free Tirzah is teaching at the Freedmen’s School, and discovers an advertisement in the local paper looking for her. Though she knows Harrison must have placed it, and longs to find him, the risks of fleeing are too great, and Tirzah chooses the life of seeming security right in front of her.

Spanning over a hundred and fifty years, Morgan Jerkins’s extraordinary novel intertwines the stories of these star-crossed lovers and their descendants. As Tirzah's family moves across the countryĚýduring the Great Migration, they challenge authority with devastating consequences, while of the legacy of heartbreak and loss continues on in the lives of Harrison's progeny.

When Ardelia meets Oliver, she finds his family’s history is as full of secrets and omissions as her own. Could their connection be a cosmic reconciliation satisfying the unfulfilled desires of their ancestors, or will the weight of the past, present and future tear them apart?

Sweeping, textured, and meticulously researched, Zeal is both a story of how one generation’s choices reverberate through the years and an indelible portrait of an enduring love.]]> 416 Morgan Jerkins 0063234084 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.30 2025
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name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.30
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]]> 223436601 An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.�

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]> 382 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.27 2025
author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.27
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 213870084 From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.â€� This tweet was viewed over 10 million times.Ěý

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.Ěý

This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France and Germany.â€� It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called â€�rules-based order,â€� a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.Ěý

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> 208 Omar El Akkad 0593804147 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.69 2025
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name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.69
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]]> 212995906 From the New York Times bestselling author of House on Fire, a breakneck thriller that marries the dynastic opulence of Succession with the tense and disorienting spy craft of The Americans.

Paul Brightman is a man on the run, living under an assumed name in a small New England town with a million-dollar bounty on his head. When his security is breached, Paul is forced to flee into the New Hampshire wilderness to evade Russian operatives who can seemingly predict his every move.

Six years ago, Paul was a rising star on Wall Street who fell in love with a beautiful photographer named Tatyana—unaware that her father was a Russian oligarch and the object of considerable interest from several US intelligence agencies. Now, to save his own life, Paul must unravel a decades-old conspiracy that extends to the highest reaches of the government.

Rivaling the classic spy novels of the Cold War, The Oligarch’s Daughter is a breakneck thriller built for the frightening world we live in now.]]> 447 Joseph Finder 0063396025 Johnisha 3 4.14 2025
author: Joseph Finder
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 3
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]]> 7126 The epic tale of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge, in its definitive translation

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to use the treasure to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas� epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.

Translated with an Introduction by Robin Buss

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here]]> 1276 Alexandre Dumas 0140449264 Johnisha 3 4.29 1846
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1846
rating: 3
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]]> 38926072 Our American Israel tells the story of how a Jewish state in the Middle East came to resonate profoundly with a broad range of Americans in the twentieth century. Beginning with debates about Zionism after World War II, Israel’s identity has been entangled with America’s belief in its own exceptional nature. Now, in the twenty-first century, Amy Kaplan challenges the associations underlying this special alliance.

Through popular narratives expressed in news media, fiction, and film, a shared sense of identity emerged from the two nations� histories as settler societies. Americans projected their own origin myths onto Israel: the biblical promised land, the open frontier, the refuge for immigrants, the revolt against colonialism. Israel assumed a mantle of moral authority, based on its image as an “invincible victim,� a nation of intrepid warriors and concentration camp survivors. This paradox persisted long after the Six-Day War, when the United States rallied behind a story of the Israeli David subduing the Arab Goliath. The image of the underdog shattered when Israel invaded Lebanon and Palestinians rose up against the occupation in the 1980s. Israel’s military was strongly censured around the world, including notes of dissent in the United States. Rather than a symbol of justice, Israel became a model of military strength and technological ingenuity.

In America today, Israel’s political realities pose difficult challenges. Turning a critical eye on the turbulent history that bound the two nations together, Kaplan unearths the roots of present controversies that may well divide them in the future.]]> 368 Amy Kaplan 0674737628 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.22 2018
author: Amy Kaplan
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> 208891684 An inspiring collection of essays, personal and political, from the leading environmental justice activist of our time, that frames the challenges we face as a society and—with grace, generosity, and hope—charts the way toward equity, respect, and a brighter future.

Described by Bryan Stevenson as “the center of the quest for environmental justice in America,� Catherine Coleman Flowers has dedicated her life to fighting for the most vulnerable communities—rural, poor, of color—who have been deprived of the basic civil right to a clean, safe, and sustainable environment. Both deeply personal and urgently political, the essays in Holy Ground draw on history to illuminate and contextualize the most pressing issues of this moment: from climate change to human rights, from rural poverty to reproductive justice, from the notorious history of Lowndes County, Alabama, to the broader crisis of racialized disinvestment in the South. Flowers maps the distance and direction toward justice, examining her own diverse ancestry as evidence of our interconnectedness. She reflects on trailblazers who have fought for social and environmental justice. She writes about her mother, a civil rights activist who lost her life to gun violence, and her own deeply personal experience with reproductive justice. And in a remarkably candid and moving piece, she writes about a traumatic attack that occurred at a moment of collective triumph, in which she weighs her fight for the common good against her own well-being. Flowers’s faith shines throughout the collection, guiding her work and inspiring her vision of our responsibility to one another and to our shared home.

Drawn from a lifetime of organizing, activism, and change-making, Holy Ground equips us with clarity, lights a way forward, and rouses us to action—for ourselves and for each other, for our communities, and, ultimately, for our planet.]]> 247 Catherine Coleman Flowers 1954118694 Johnisha 3 4.37
author: Catherine Coleman Flowers
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.37
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]]> 213395490 The legendary author of England’s Dreaming presents a monumental history of the queer influence on popular culture, from the rise of Little Richard to the collapse of disco in 1979.


In his kaleidoscopic new book, Jon Savage, the legendary author of England’s Dreaming, shows how music has been the key medium through which homosexuality was expressed for the last century. Depicting nothing less than the birth of rock and roll, the narrative begins in the mid-1950s with Little Richard, whose music possessed secret codes of the gay underworld and whose magnetism attracted millions of white teenagers. As Savage engagingly proceeds through the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with evocations of, among others, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Donna Summer, Sylvester, and the disco-era Bee Gees, he demonstrates that it was mostly music—with supporting roles from cinema, literature, and fashion—that broke the dam that led to the widespread acceptance of LGBTQ culture today. The Secret Public, with its “pancake and pompadour� descriptions of a generation in revolt, provides an electrifying look at the key moments in music and entertainment that changed pop culture forever.]]> 784 Jon Savage 1324096101 Johnisha 4 3.77 2024
author: Jon Savage
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/22
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]]> 58684290
In beautiful, compassionate prose, Lee elegantly offers wisdom about what it means to authentically and defiantly claim space for grief’s complicated feelings and emotions. And Lee is no stranger to grief herself, she shares her journey after losing her mother, a pregnancy, and, most recently, a cousin to the COVID-19 pandemic. These losses transformed her life and led her to question what grief really is and what healing actually looks like.ĚýIn this book, she also explores the unique impact of grief on Black people and reveals the key factors that proper healing requires: permission, care, feeling, grace and more.

The transformation we each undergo after loss is the indelible imprint of the people we love on our lives, which is the true definition of legacy. At its core,Ěý Ěýexplores what comes after death, and shows us that if we are able to own and honor what we’ve lost, we can experience a beautiful and joyful life in the midst of grief.Ěý]]> 178 Marisa Renee Lee 0306926024 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.14
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name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.14
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]]> 11869272
In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter - Annawadi's "most-everything girl" - will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call "the full enjoy."

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.]]> 278 Katherine Boo 1400067553 Johnisha 5 3.97 2012
author: Katherine Boo
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 212924052 Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city’s squatting phenomenon, in which thousands occupied vacant homes without the permission of the record owner. After a long sojourn in South Africa, where she researched the theft of land and homes from Black citizens, she wanted to immerse herself in a project that showcased Black agency. And yet what she found in Detroit was too urgent to ignore. Her neighbors, many of whom had owned their homes for decades, were losing them to property tax foreclosure. Even though the reasons why this was happening were shrouded, the results were once bustling Black neighborhoods blighted with vacant homes and trash-strewn lots, social networks eroded, family legacies lost. It was a puzzle that would take five years of dogged investigation, including hundreds of interviews with homeowners, landlords, real estate investors, and city officials to solve, but data point by data point, loss by loss, a story emerged, one very different from the dominant narratives that blamed irresponsible homeowners or a few corrupt politicians.

As Atuahene demonstrates, the problem is a system of predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through racist policies–a nationwide practice in no way limited to Detroit. In this powerful work of scholarship and storytelling, Atuahene expands our nation’s racial justice conversation from the physical violence that state agents exert to the less conspicuous, but intensely damaging bureaucratic violence that they routinely inflict. Unlike brutal police murders captured on video, predatory governance hides in plain sight, inviting complicity from well-meaning people, eviscerating communities, and widening the racial wealth gap. By following the lives of two grandfathers who migrated to Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century to work at Ford Motor Company—one Black the other white—and their grandchildren, Atuahene tells a riveting, braided tale about racist policies, how they take root, why they advance and flourish, who profits, and perhaps most crucially, explains what it takes to dismantle them.]]> 384 Bernadette Atuahene 0316572217 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.10 2025
author: Bernadette Atuahene
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/12
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]]> 35297426 She was fifteen, her mother's golden girl. She had her whole life ahead of her. And then, in the blink of an eye, Ellie was gone.

NOW
It’s been ten years since Ellie disappeared, but Laurel has never given up hope of finding her daughter.

And then one day a charming and charismatic stranger called Floyd walks into a café and sweeps Laurel off her feet.

Before too long she’s staying the night at this house and being introduced to his nine year old daughter.

Poppy is precocious and pretty - and meeting her completely takes Laurel's breath away.

Because Poppy is the spitting image of Ellie when she was that age. And now all those unanswered questions that have haunted Laurel come flooding back.

What happened to Ellie? Where did she go?

Who still has secrets to hide?]]> 359 Lisa Jewell 1501154648 Johnisha 4 4.02 2017
author: Lisa Jewell
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> 199534697 A surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue—and its fascinating role in Black history and culture—from National Book Award winner Imani Perry

Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?� In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.

Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as art and history: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as “Blue Black.� The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one gone too soon.

Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.]]> 256 Imani Perry 0062977393 Johnisha 4 4.33 2025
author: Imani Perry
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/05
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]]> 214283593 The future of storytelling is here.

Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.

In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.

What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.]]> 448 Nnedi Okorafor 0063391147 Johnisha 3 4.11 2025
author: Nnedi Okorafor
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
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]]> 212113438 In the vein of Never Let Me Go and Killers of the Flower Moon, one of America’s greatest storytellers sheds light on an American the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the �cultural genocide� experienced by the Native American children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School . . .

In September of 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle school � a military-style boarding school for Indians run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt’s motto, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man� is enforced in the classroom as well as the dorm speak English, forget your own language and customs, learn to be white.

While the students navigate survival, they hear rumors of a sweeping tribal lands reservations in the west—the “ghost dance,â€� whereby desperate Native Americans engaged in frenzied dancing and chanting hoping it will cause the buffalo will return, the Indian dead to rise, and the white people to disappear. Local whites panic, and the government sends in troops to keep the reservations under control.Ěý

When legendary medicine man Sitting Bull is killed by native police working for the government troops, each Carlisle resident is faced with the Whose side are you on?Ěý And what will you risk to gain your freedom?]]> 331 John Sayles 1685891322 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.76
author: John Sayles
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.76
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]]> 125441 416 Angela Y. Davis 0717806677 Johnisha 3 4.44 1974
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1974
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/27
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]]> 635635 From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women.

"Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard." �The New York Times

Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women's rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger's racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.]]> 271 Angela Y. Davis 0394713516 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.58 1981
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.58
book published: 1981
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> 215198466 In his most exhilarating novel yet, Britain’s greatest storyteller transports you from the vibrant streets of sixties London to the sun-soaked cobbles of Cadiz and the frosty squares of Warsaw, as an accidental spy is drawn into the shadows of espionage and obsession.

Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing the changing landscapes in the grip of the Cold War. When he’s offered the chance to interview a political figure, his ambition leads him unwittingly into a web of duplicities and betrayals.

As Gabriel’s reluctant initiation takes hold, he is drawn deeper into the shadows. Falling under the spell of Faith Green, an enigmatic and ruthless MI6 handler, he becomes �her spy�, unable to resist her demands. But amid the peril, paranoia and passion consuming Gabriel’s new covert life, it will be the revelations closer to home that change the rest of his story.]]> 272 William Boyd 0802164870 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.87 2024
author: William Boyd
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
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]]> 214151348
A young student sits on a bench in a park in San Miguel, Mexico. Bonita is away from her home in India to learn Spanish. She is alone, somewhere she has no connection to. It is bliss.

And then a woman approaches her. The woman claims to recognize Bonita because she is the spitting image of her mother, who made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother didn’t paint. She never travelled to Mexico. But this strange woman insists, and so Bonita follows her. Into a story where Bonita and her mother will move apart and come together, and where the past threatens to flood the present, or re-write it.]]> 112 Anita Desai 1668082438 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.18 2024
author: Anita Desai
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
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]]> 13330922 The Count of Monte CristoĚý˛ą˛Ô»ĺ The Three Musketeers.

The real-life protagonist of The Black Count, General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today yet with a story that is strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of the best loved heroes of literature.

Yet, hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: the real hero was the son of a black slave -- who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time.ĚýBorn in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. Enlisting as a private, he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution in an audacious campaign across Europe and the Middle East â€� until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat.

The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.]]> 414 Tom Reiss 030738246X Johnisha 5 4.00 2012
author: Tom Reiss
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/20
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]]> 229445
The author is able to combine the most innovative and radical thinking on several fronts--racial theory, feminist, and legal--to produce a work that is at once history and political treatise.ĚýĚýBy using the history of how American law--beginning with slavery--has treated the issue of the state's rightĚýĚýto interfere with the black woman's body, the author explosively and effectively makes the case for the legal redress to the racist implications of current policy with regards to 1) access to and coercive dispensing of birth control to poor black women 2) the criminalization of parenting by poor black women who have used drugs 3) the stigmatization and devaluation of poor black mothers under the new welfare provisions, and 4) the differential access to and disproportionate spending of social resources on the new reproductive technologies used by wealthy white couples to insure genetically related offspring.

The legal redress of the racism inherent in currentĚýĚýAmerican law and policy in these matters, the author argues in her last chapter, demands and should lead us to adopt a new standard and definition of the liberal theory of "liberty" and "equality" based on the need for, and the positive role of government in fostering, social as well as individual justice.]]> 400 Dorothy Roberts 0679758690 Johnisha 5 4.45 1997
author: Dorothy Roberts
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/14
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]]> 205363945 A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia—and sought to transform their lives.

How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives.

Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members.

Central to this effort was the shrine’s chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism. The Shrine’s members opened bookstores and co-ops, created a self-defense force, and raised their children communally, eventually working to establish the country’s largest Black-owned farm, where the effort to create an earthly paradise for Black people continues today.

The Black Utopians is the story of a movement and of a world still in the making—one that points the way toward radical alternatives for the future.]]> 400 Aaron Robertson 0374604983 Johnisha 4 3.81
author: Aaron Robertson
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.81
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rating: 4
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]]> 58283071 From the author of The Real Lolita and editor of Unspeakable Acts, the astonishing story of a murderer who conned the people around him--including conservative thinker William F. Buckley--into helping set him free

In the 1960s, Edgar Smith, in prison and sentenced to death for the murder of teenager Victoria Zielinski, struck up a correspondence with William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review. Buckley, who refused to believe that a man who supported the neoconservative movement could have committed such a heinous crime, began to advocate not only for Smith's life to be spared but also for his sentence to be overturned.

So begins a bizarre and tragic tale of mid-century America. Sarah Weinman's Scoundrel leads us through the twists of fate and fortune that brought Smith to freedom, book deals, fame, and eventually to attempting murder again. In Smith, Weinman has uncovered a psychopath who slipped his way into public acclaim and acceptance before crashing down to earth once again.

From the people Smith deceived--Buckley, the book editor who published his work, friends from back home, and the women who loved him--to Americans who were willing to buy into his lies, Weinman explores who in our world is accorded innocence, and how the public becomes complicit in the stories we tell one another.

Scoundrel shows, with clear eyes and sympathy for all those who entered Smith's orbit, how and why he was able to manipulate, obfuscate, and make a mockery of both well-meaning people and the American criminal justice system. It tells a forgotten part of American history at the nexus of justice, prison reform, and civil rights, and exposes how one man's ill-conceived plan to set another man free came at the great expense of Edgar Smith's victims.]]> 464 Sarah Weinman 0062899767 Johnisha 4 3.54 2022
author: Sarah Weinman
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/01
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]]> 63095764 The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants.

Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.

Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent of one of the participants in the raid--shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.

Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman's US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.

After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. These formerly enslaved peoples on the Sea Island indigo and cotton plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity--perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid.
]]> 776 Edda L. Fields-Black 019755279X Johnisha 0 to-read 4.18 2024
author: Edda L. Fields-Black
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> 200740851
In the early days of the reproductive rights movement, two pioneering activists Margaret Sanger and Mary Dennett. Sanger would go on to found Planned Parenthood, while Dennett’s name has largely faded from public awareness. Each held a radically different vision for what reproductive autonomy and birth control access should look like in America.

Few are aware of the fierce personal and political rivalry that played out between Sanger and Dennett over decades—a battle that had a profound impact on the lives of American women. Stephanie Gorton’s meticulously researched and vividly drawn new history, The Icon and the Idealist, reveals how and why these two women came to activism, the origins of the clash between them, and the ways in which their missteps and breakthroughs have reverberated across American society for generations.

With deep archival scope and rigorous execution, The Icon and the Idealist weaves together a personal narrative of two fascinating women and the political history of a country arriving at one of the most necessary social inventions of the modern day. Refusing to shy away from the enmeshed struggles of race, class, and gender, Gorton has made a sweeping examination of every force that has come in the way of women’s reproductive freedom.

Brimming with insight and compelling portraits of women’s struggles throughout the twentieth century, The Icon and the Idealist is a comprehensive history of a radical cultural movement.Ěý]]> 464 Stephanie Gorton 0063036290 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.95
author: Stephanie Gorton
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.95
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]]> 22253777 That is, until chance intervenes and a booking agent offers Audrey a ticket to join the booming jazz scene in Harlem—an offer she can’t resist, not even for Caroline. And in New York City the music never stops. Audrey flirts with love and takes the stage at the Apollo, with its fast-dancing crowds and blinding lights. But fortunes can turn fast in the city—young talent means tough competition, and for Audrey failure is always one step away. Meanwhile, Caroline sinks into the quiet anguish of a Black woman in a backwards country, where her ambitions and desires only slip further out of reach.


Jacinda Townsend’s remarkable first novel is a coming-of-age story made at once gripping and poignant by the wild energy of the Jazz Era and the stark realities of segregation. Marrying musical prose with lyric vernacular, Saint Monkey delivers a stirring portrait of American storytelling and marks the appearance of an auspicious new voice in literary fiction.]]> 362 Jacinda Townsend 0393350827 Johnisha 3 3.61 2014
author: Jacinda Townsend
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/26
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]]> 210246742 A clear and concise guide to the politics of post-Roe America, for readers eager to understand the attacks on our bodies and freedom—and to do something about it

In this, her most urgent book yet, New York Times–bestselling author Jessica Valenti dispels misinformation and cuts through the headline overwhelm to illuminate the full-scale assault conservative lawmakers have launched on women’s freedom—and fundamental human rights. Valenti provides the language to talk about abortion with confidence and the facts to convince.

American voters overwhelmingly support abortion rights and have for decades. In the years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, that support has been growing, as nearly seventy-percent of Americans want abortion to be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, and sixty-three percent want abortion medication to be legal. Abortion is among the key tools conservatives use to roll back decades of advances for women, but here Valenti arms readers with the truth needed to fight back and win, not only at the dinner table but at the polling station and all the way to the Supreme Court.]]> 256 Jessica Valenti 0593800230 Johnisha 5 4.70 2024
author: Jessica Valenti
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.70
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> 209122679
While scholars and commentators have exhaustively detailed, analyzed, and debated Malcolm X’s post-prison life, they have not explored these six and a half transformative years in any depth. Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Patrick Parr’s Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first 27 years of Malcolm X’s life (1925�1965).

Parr traces Malcolm’s African lineage, explores his complicated childhood in the Midwest, and follows him as he moves east to live with his sister Ella in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where he is convicted of burglary and sentenced. Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the reader into the unique cultures—at times brutal and at times instructional—of Charlestown State Prison, the Concord Reformatory, and the Norfolk Prison Colony.

It was at these institutions that Malcolm devoured books, composed poetry, boxed, debated, and joined the Nation of Islam, changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture. In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told.Ěý]]> 352 Patrick Parr 1625348169 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.24 2024
author: Patrick Parr
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2024
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]]> 87556695
“�Let us descend,� the poet now began, �and enter this blind world.’� � Inferno, Dante Alighieri

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.]]> 305 Jesmyn Ward 198210449X Johnisha 5 3.68 2023
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/20
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]]> 123036004 A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.]]> 307 Amanda Peters 1646221958 Johnisha 4 4.04 2023
author: Amanda Peters
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/17
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]]> 199534613
“[An] enormously entertaining and lovable book.� —Nick Hornby, New York Times Book Review

A bold, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartwarming story about one young woman’s attempt to navigate adulthood, new motherhood, and her meager bank account in our increasingly online world—from the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of The Knockout Queen.

As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.

Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?

Blisteringly funny and filled with sharp insight, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a tender tale starring an endearing young heroine who’s struggling to wrest money and power from a world that has little interest in giving it to her. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off.

“A wholly original novel. . . . Thorpe is both poetic and profound in the way she brings her remarkable story to an end.� —The Associated Press]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.86 2024
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
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]]> 211487294 A Simon & Schuster book. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader.]]> 410 Michael Tackett 1668005867 Johnisha 4 4.15
author: Michael Tackett
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.15
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/13
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]]> 201750876 343 Regina Porter 059324186X Johnisha 4 3.30 2024
author: Regina Porter
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/06
date added: 2024/12/06
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]]> 16144046 Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, defied the odds and, in the process, changed America. In the first half of the twentieth century, Dunbar was an academically elite public school, despite being racially segregated by law and existing at the mercy of racist congressmen who held the school’s purse strings. These enormous challenges did not stop the local community from rallying for the cause of educating its children.

Dunbar attracted an extraordinary faculty: one early principal was the first black graduate of Harvard, almost all the teachers had graduate degrees, and several earned PhDs—all extraordinary achievements given the Jim Crow laws of the times. Over the school’s first eighty years, these teachers developed generations of highly educated, high-achieving African Americans, groundbreakers that included the first black member of a presidential cabinet, the first black graduate of the US Naval Academy, the first black army general, the creator of the modern blood bank, the first black state attorney general, the legal mastermind behind school desegregation, and hundreds of educators.

By the 1950s, Dunbar High School was sending 80 percent of its students to college. Today, as with too many troubled urban public schools, the majority of Dunbar students struggle with reading and math. Journalist and author Alison Stewart, whose parents were both Dunbar graduates, tells the story of the school’s rise, fall, and path toward resurgence as it looks to reopen its new, state-of-the-art campus in the fall of 2013.]]> 352 Alison Stewart 1613740093 Johnisha 3 3.75 2013
author: Alison Stewart
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> 59229378
Texas Ranger Darren Mathews isn’t sure he’s been a good cop, but believes he’s got a shot at being a good man—if he manages to dodge the potential indictment hanging over his head and if he, from here on out, pledges allegiance to the truth. It’s a virtue the country appears to have wholly lost its grip on, but one Darren sees as his salvation. He is in the midst of remaking his life with the woman he loves, hoping for the peace of country living at his beloved farmhouse, when he is visited by someone who couldn’t hold the truth on her tongue if it was dipped in sugar, a woman who’s always been bent of tearing his life apart. His mother. Armed with a tall tale about a missing Black college student, Sera (whose white sorority sisters insist she isn’t missing at all). Darren must decide if his can trust his mother is telling the truth—and what her ulterior motive may be, and what if that motive has to do with a grand jury deciding his fate.

Darren gets his hooks into the investigation, along the way discovering things about Sera’s family and her hometown that are odd at best, vaguely sinister at worst. Hamstrung by local law enforcement and the Texas Rangers who likewise doubt the account of a missing girl, if Darren wants answers, he’ll need help from the person whom he swore to never trust again—his mother.

In this emotionally stirring conclusion to the singular Highway 59 series, set three years after the events of Heaven, My Home, Darren reckons with his life’s purpose as he’s forced to choose between his own peace and the higher call to do good.]]> 320 Attica Locke 1788163982 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.93 2024
author: Attica Locke
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> 43521642 The thrilling follow-up to the award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird: Texas Ranger Darren Matthews is on the hunt for a boy who's gone missing - but it's the boy's family of white supremacists who are his real target.


9-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; now he's alone in the darkness of vast Caddo Lake, in a boat whose motor just died. A sudden noise distracts him - and all goes dark.

Darren Matthews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness; after the events of his previous investigation, his marriage is in a precarious state of re-building, and his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother, who's never exactly had his best interests at heart. Now she holds the key to his freedom, and she's not above a little maternal blackmail to press her advantage.

An unlikely possibility of rescue arrives in the form of a case down Highway 59, in a small lakeside town where the local economy thrives on nostalgia for ante-bellum Texas - and some of the era's racial attitudes still thrive as well. Levi's disappearance has links to Darren's last case, and to a wealthy businesswoman, the boy's grandmother, who seems more concerned about the fate of her business than that of her grandson.

Darren has to battle centuries-old suspicions and prejudices, as well as threats that have been reignited in the current political climate, as he races to find the boy, and to save himself.

Attica Locke proves that the acclaim and awards for Bluebird, Bluebird were justly deserved, in this thrilling new novel about crimes old and new.]]> 295 Attica Locke 0316363405 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.85 2019
author: Attica Locke
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> 40605488 A powerful thriller about the explosive intersection of love, race, and justice from a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire.

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.

When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders--a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman--have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes--and save himself in the process--before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.

A rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas, Bluebird, Bluebird is an exhilarating, timely novel about the collision of race and justice in America.]]> 320 Attica Locke Johnisha 0 to-read 3.84 2017
author: Attica Locke
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> 63347538
In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divided people. A language of freedom played a similar role in shaping the new nation. The Declaration of Independence’s assertion “that all men are created equal,� Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty, or give me death!,� and Francis Scott Key’s “star-spangled banner� waving over “the land of the free and the home of the brave,� were anthemic celebrations of a newly free people. Resonating across the country, they encouraged the creation of a republic where the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness� was universal, natural, and inalienable.

For enslaved people and their allies, the language and symbols that served as national touchstones made a mockery of freedom. Deriding the ideas that infused the republic’s founding, they encouraged an empty American culture that accepted the abstract notion of equality rather than the concrete idea. Yet, as award-winning author Matthew J. Clavin reveals, it was these powerful expressions of American nationalism that inspired forceful and even violent resistance to slavery.

Symbols of Freedom is the surprising story of how enslaved people and their allies drew inspiration from the language and symbols of American freedom. Interpreting patriotic words, phrases, and iconography literally, they embraced a revolutionary nationalism that not only justified but generated open opposition. Mindful and proud that theirs was a nation born in blood, these disparate patriots fought to fulfill the republic’s promise by waging war against slavery.

In a time when the US flag, the Fourth of July, and historical sites have never been more contested, this book reminds us that symbols are living artifacts whose power is derived from the meaning with which we imbue them.]]> 304 Matthew J. Clavin Johnisha 0 to-read 4.47 2023
author: Matthew J. Clavin
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/01
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]]> 50403757
After chronicling America’s transformation from a center-left to center-right nation for two decades, Rick Perlstein now focuses on the tumultuous life of President Ronald Reagan from 1976�1980. Within the book’s four-year time frame, Perlstein touches on themes of confluence as he discusses the four stories that define American politics up to the age of Trump.

There is the rise of a newly aggressive corporate America diligently organizing to turn back the liberal tide: powerful unions, environmentalism, and unprecedentedly suffusing regulation. There is the movement of political mobilized conservative Christians, organizing to reverse the cultural institutionalization of the 1960s insurgencies. Third, there is the war for the Democratic Party, transformed under Jimmy Carter as a vehicle promoting “austerity� and “sacrifice”—a turn that spurs a counter-reaction from liberal forces who go to war with Carter to return the party to its populist New Deal patrimony. And finally, there is the ascendency of Ronald Reagan, considered washed up after his 1976 defeat for the Republican nomination and too old to run for president in any event, who nonetheless dramatically emerges as the heroic embodiment of America’s longing to transcend the 1970s dark storms—from Love Canal to Jonestown, John Wayne Gacy to the hostages in Iran.

Perlstein explores the complex years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency offering new and timely insights to issues that still remain relevant today.]]> 1107 Rick Perlstein 1476793050 Johnisha 0 to-finish 4.33 2020
author: Rick Perlstein
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/01
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]]> 204316963 An award-winning journalist's deeply reported exploration of how race, identity and political trauma have influenced the rise in far-right sentiment among Latinos, and how this group can shape American politics

Democrats have historically assumed they can rely on the Latino vote, but recent elections have called that loyalty into question. Despite his vociferous anti-immigrant rhetoric and disastrous border policies, Trump won a higher percentage of the Latino vote in 2020 than he did in 2016. Journalist Paola Ramos pulls back the curtain on these voters, traveling around the country to uncover what motivates them to vote for and support issues that seem so at odds with their self-interest.

From coast to coast, cities to rural towns, Defectors introduces readers to underdog GOP candidates, January 6 insurrectionists, Evangelical pastors, and culture war crusaders as it identifies the influences at the heart of this rightward shift. Through their stories, Ramos shows how tribalism, traditionalism, and political trauma within the Latino community has been weaponized to radicalize and convert voters who, like many of their white counterparts, are fearful of losing their place in American society.]]> 256 Paola Ramos 0593701364 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.46
author: Paola Ramos
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.46
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]]> 26883558
Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.

A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?]]> 149 Victor LaValle 0765387867 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.80 2016
author: Victor LaValle
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/29
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]]> 127282874
In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon’s stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of “dis-alienation� in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital. Today, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin’s essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel’s Clinic , Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon’s extraordinary life―and a guide to the books that underlie today’s most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.

Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs]]> 464 Adam Shatz 0374176426 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.21 2024
author: Adam Shatz
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> 203047226 From two top New York Times journalists, the breathtaking untold story of the plan to overturn Roe v. Wade and the consequences for women, abortion, and the future of America.

In June 2022, Americans watched in shock as the Supreme Court reversed one of the nation’s landmark rulings. For nearly a half century, Roe was synonymous with women’s rights and freedoms. Then, suddenly, it was gone.

In their groundbreaking book The Fall of Roe, Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer reveal the explosive inside story of how it happened. Their investigation charts the shocking political and religious campaign to take down abortion rights and remake American families, womanhood, and the nation itself.

Reeling from Barack Obama's 2012 landslide presidential victory � and motivated by a spiritual mission � a small but determined network of elite conservative Christian lawyers and powerbrokers worked quietly and methodically to keep their true cause alive: ending abortion rights. Thinking in generational terms, they devised a strategic, top-down takeover at every level of political and legal life, from little-known anti-abortion lobbyists in far flung statehouses to the arbiters of the constitution at the highest court in the land. Broad swaths of liberal America did not register the severity of the threat until it was far too late. At a moment when women had more power than ever before, the feminist movement suffered one of the greatest political defeats in American history.]]> 448 Elizabeth Dias 1250881390 Johnisha 5 4.54 2024
author: Elizabeth Dias
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Johnisha 5 4.46 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
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]]> 195790601
With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.� Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.

In When the Clock Broke , the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con� right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk� took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals� whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.

In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.]]> 432 John Ganz 0374605440 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.08 2024
author: John Ganz
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 128714412 A darkly funny and deeply moving debut novel about crimes of desperation, dreams abandoned, and small-town secrets that won’t stay buried

As Ballina in the west of Ireland prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time dealer Cillian English and County Mayo's fraternal enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night, he finds Doll—Cillian's bruised, sullen, teenage brother—in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins, goaded by his dead mother's dog, and struck by spinning lights, Dev is unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy.

Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling that something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night, and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina.]]> 272 Colin Barrett 0802160948 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.68 2024
author: Colin Barrett
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
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]]> 158649919
Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the “American Dream.�

Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian� status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa’s childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation.

Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present—the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations—she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the “melting pot� of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.]]> 304 Deborah Jackson Taffa 0063288516 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.11 2024
author: Deborah Jackson Taffa
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
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]]> 75289824
The Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on American soil, docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860—more than half a century after the passage of a federal law banning the importation of captive Africans, and nine months before the beginning of the Civil War. The last of its survivors lived well into the twentieth century. They were the last witnesses to the final act of a terrible and significant period in world history.

In this epic work, Dr. Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the Clotilda’s 110 captives, drawing on her intensive archival, historical, and sociological research. The Survivors of the Clotilda follows their lives from their kidnappings in what is modern-day Nigeria through a terrifying 45-day journey across the Middle Passage; from the subsequent sale of the ship’s 103 surviving children and young people into slavery across Alabama to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in Selma; from the foundation of an all-Black African Town (later Africatown) in Northern Mobile—an inspiration for writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston—to the foundation of the quilting community of Gee’s Bend—a Black artistic circle whose cultural influence remains enormous.

An astonishing, deeply compelling tapestry of history, biography, and social commentary, The Survivors of the Clotilda is a tour de force that deepens our knowledge and understanding of the Black experience and of America and its tragic past.Ěý

The Survivors of the Clotilda includes 30 artworks and photographs.]]> 432 Hannah Durkin 0063073013 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.07 2024
author: Hannah Durkin
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 201866614 From the National Book Award–winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand

Harriet Tubman is, if surveys are to be trusted, one of the ten most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero—the woman who, despite being barely five feet tall, illiterate, and suffering from a brain injury, managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some 750 people. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood.

Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman’s life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes the more palpable the more we understand it—a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.]]> 336 Tiya Miles 0593491165 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.07 2024
author: Tiya Miles
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 200798634 Half a Life. She asks herself whether she told the whole truth back then. What did truth look like to her in the era of love-bead curtains, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility of May-December romance? With new understanding about the imbalance of power between an older man and a minor girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband’s death at age ninety-three.]]> 145 Jill Ciment 0593701062 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.83 2024
author: Jill Ciment
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
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]]> 195391724
Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovering and reclaiming a painful past. With the wit and rawness of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Devil Is Fine is a gripping, surreal, and brilliantly crafted dissection of the legacies we leave behind and those we inherit.]]> 272 John Vercher 1250894484 Johnisha 4 3.93 2024
author: John Vercher
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> 210201279
On June 27, 2011, a deadly chemical accident took place inside the Tyson Foods chicken processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas, where the company is headquartered. The company quickly covered it up although the spill left their employees injured, sick, and terrified. Over the years, Arkansas-based reporter Alice Driver was able to gain the trust of the immigrant workers who survived the accident. They rewarded her persistence by giving her total access to their lives.

Having spent hours in their kitchens and accompanying them to doctor’s appointments, Driver has memorialized in these pages the dramatic lives of husband and wife Plácido and Angelina, who liked to spend weekends planting seeds from their native El Salvador in their garden; father and son Martín and Gabriel, who migrated from Mexico at different times and were trying to patch up their relationship; and many other immigrants who survived the chemical accident in Springdale that day.

During the course of Alice’s reporting, the COVID-19 pandemic struck the community, and the workers were forced to continue production in unsafe conditions, watching their colleagues get sick and die one by one. These essential workers, many of whom only speak Spanish and some of whom are illiterate—all of whom suffer the health consequences of Tyson’s negligence—somehow found the strength and courage to organize and fight back, culminating in a lawsuit against Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in America.

Richly detailed, fiercely honest, and deeply reported, Life and Death of the American Worker will forever change the way we think about the people who prepare our food.]]> 272 Alice Driver 1668078821 Johnisha 5 4.13 2024
author: Alice Driver
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/11
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]]> 199797888
The murder of Lita McClinton Sullivan sent shockwaves through the affluent suburb of Buckhead, Georgia like few other crimes before it. The neighborhood, with its picturesque homes and top-tier schools, was simply not the kind of place where women were gunned down in cold blood and on their own doorstep. How many socialites had enemies so dangerous they would be murdered by a hitman pretending to deliver roses at 8:15 in the morning?

Lita was an intelligent, accomplished, and stunning Black woman from a respected Atlanta family, but her interracial marriage to soon-to-be-millionaire Jim Sullivan was still a newsworthy occurrence at the time in Macon, Georgia. There was trouble from the start. Jim’s charm couldn't smooth over the blatant racism Lita experienced in Macon, and Jim’s behavior quickly became bizarre and controlling. At first, Jim just seemed oddly frugal, wearing his dead grandfather's underwear and squireling away condiment packages. Then he isolated Lita from her friends and family, monitored every aspect of her life, and berated her for spending any money. He then sold his company for millions and bought a mansion in Palm Springs, Florida—without telling his wife.

It was the final straw for Lita. She filed for divorce, loaded up her belongings in a U-Haul, and did not look back. But as the legal battle over the divorce and their prenuptial agreement dragged on, the now reclusive millionaire had a chance encounter with Tony Harwood, an itinerant truck driver. As the two commiserated, Jim let slip his divorce woes. Harwood would later claim his response that he could "take care of Jim's wife problem" for $25,000 was a joke. That was until a certified check for a $12,500 down payment appeared in his mailbox.

In A Devil Went Down to Georgia , Deb Miller Landau details the shocking events that followed; the shoddy police work the McClinton family logically still blames on racial bias; the manhunt for Jim spanning almost two decades and three countries after the DA allowed him to run; and Jim's long-overdue conviction. The twists and turns of this trial seem never-ending, but Landau's rigorous investigation is the first complete account of this tragic American crime and brings long-overdue recognition to Lita and her family's fight for justice.]]> 256 Deb Miller Landau 1639366830 Johnisha 5 4.22 2024
author: Deb Miller Landau
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/08
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]]> 60277002 480 Aran Shetterly 0062858211 Johnisha 4 4.26 2024
author: Aran Shetterly
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/05
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]]> 210454076 Power, privilege, and blood—this is the definitive and thrilling true story of Alex Murdaugh’s violent downfall, from a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter who has become an authority on the case.
Ěý
Alex Murdaugh was a benevolent dictator—the president of the South Carolina trial lawyers� association, a political boss, a part-time prosecutor, and a partner in his family’s law firm. He was always ready with a favor, a drink, and an invitation to Moselle, his family’s 1,700-acre hunting estate. The Murdaugh name ignited respect—and fear—for a hundred miles.

When he murdered his wife, Maggie, and son Paul at Moselle on a dark summer night, the fragile façade of Alex’s world could no longer hold. His forefathers had covered up a midnight suicide at a remote railroad crossing, a bootlegging ring run from a courthouse, and the attempted murder of a pregnant lover. Alex, too, almost walked away from his unspeakable crimes with his reputation intact, but his downfall was secured by a twist of fate, some stray mistakes, and a fateful decision by an old friend who’d finally seen enough.

Why would a man who had everything kill his wife and grown son? To unwind the roots of Alex’s ruin, award-winning journalist Valerie Bauerlein reported not just from the courthouse every day but also along the backroads and through the tidal marshes of South Carolina’s Lowcountry. When the jurors made their pilgrimage to the crime scene, trying to envision Maggie and Paul’s last moments, she walked right behind them, sensing the ghosts that haunt the Murdaughs� now-shattered legacy.

Through masterful research and cinematic writing, The Devil at His Elbow is a transporting journey through Alex’s life, the night of the murders, and the investigation that culminated in a trial that held tens of millions spellbound. With her stunning insights and fearless instinct for the truth, Bauerlein uncovers layers of the Murdaugh murder case that have not been told.]]> 480 Valerie Bauerlein 059350058X Johnisha 4 4.45 2024
author: Valerie Bauerlein
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/28
date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> 386739
On the Courthouse Lawn investigates how the lynchings implicated average white citizens, some of whom actively participated in the violence, while many others witnessed the lynchings but did nothing to stop them. Ifill observes that this history of complicity has become embedded in the social and cultural fabric of local communities, who either supported, condoned, or ignored the violence. She traces the lingering effects of two lynchings in Maryland to illustrate how ubiquitous this history is and issues a clarion call for American communities with histories of racial violence to be proactive in facing this legacy today.

Inspired by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as by techniques of restorative justice, Ifill provides concrete ideas to help communities heal, including placing gravestones on the unmarked burial sites of lynching victims, issuing public apologies, establishing mandatory school programs on the local history of lynching, financially compensating those whose family homes or businesses were destroyed in the aftermath of lynching, and creating commemorative public spaces. Because the contemporary effects of racial violence are experienced most intensely in local communities, Ifill argues that reconciliation and reparation efforts must also be locally based in order to bring both black and white Americans together in an efficacious dialogue.

A landmark book, On the Courthouse Lawn is a much-needed and urgent road map for communities finally confronting lynching’s long shadow by embracing pragmatic reconciliation and reparation efforts.

“Professor Ifill has written a sobering and eye-opening book on one of America’s darkest secrets. On the Courthouse Lawn offers a compelling examination of lynchings and describes the failure of people and institutions to adequately address one of America’s tragedies. Racial amnesia would suggest we forget this history. Professor Ifill assures us that we cannot—and should not—forget it. This is a must read for anyone willing to examine our history carefully and learn from it.� —Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice

“On the Courthouse Lawn is an elegantly written and persuasively argued case for local communities to confront their history of lynching and racial violence as a means of healing race relations. Explaining how Truth and Reconciliation worked in South Africa, Ifill explores the possibilities and offers concrete advice on how it could be widely employed in the United States. It is certainly worth trying.� —Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

“In calm, objective but no less moving detail, Sherrilyn Ifill’s book provides the stories that illuminate the photographs and postcards of lynchings, the punishment meted out to some 5,000 black people deemed guilty without trial for matters large and small during the first half of the twentieth century. Too late for justice for the victims of lynch law, Professor Ifill urges that an American version of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission could bring long-denied acknowledgment to whites and a measure of consolation to blacks.� —Derrick Bell, author of Faces at the Bottom of the Well and Ethical Ambition]]> 204 Sherrilyn A. Ifill 0807009873 Johnisha 4 to-finish 4.12 2007
author: Sherrilyn A. Ifill
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/21
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-finish
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]]> 44068840 280 Robin Marty 1632460858 Johnisha 4 4.02 2019
author: Robin Marty
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/22
date added: 2024/10/22
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]]> 204316858 A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long. Wright Thompson’s family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely unknown, including where it took place and how many people were involved. This is no the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing.ĚýIn August 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi.ĚýAfter their inevitable acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, which was misleading about where the long night of hell took place and who was involved.ĚýIn fact, Wright Thompson reveals, at least nine people can be placed at the scene, which was inside the barn of one of the killers, on a plot of land within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues on nearby Dockery Plantation. Even in the context of the brutal caste regime of the time, the four-hour torture and murder of a boy barely in his teens for whistling at a young white woman was acutely depraved; Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Wright Thompson has a deep understanding of this story—the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, and all the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map.ĚýAs he shows, the full horror of the crime was its inevitability, and how much about it we still need to understand. Ultimately this is a story about property, and money, and power.ĚýIt implicates all of us.ĚýIn The Barn, Thompson befriends the few people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light, people like Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till’s friend, who came down from Chicago with him that summer, and is the last person alive to know him well.ĚýWheeler Parker’s journey to put the killing floor of the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a journey we all need to go on if this country is to heal from its oldest, deepest wound.]]> 448 Wright Thompson 0593299825 Johnisha 0 to-finish 4.36 2024
author: Wright Thompson
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/19
shelves: to-finish
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I won’t rate this in fairness because I got about 1/3 in and had to discontinue. I do feel there is a lot here about the history of Mississippi and race that is worth exploring, but I found that the book ultimately didn’t have the tightness of focus and writing I prefer. Conceptually it was intriguing however.
]]> 178100
Here are the stories of the extraordinary men and women who made the music: Louis Armstrong, the fatherless waif whose unrivaled genius helped turn jazz into a soloist's art and influenced every singer, every instrumentalist who came after him; Duke Ellington, the pampered son of middle-class parents who turned a whole orchestra into his personal instrument, wrote nearly two thousand pieces for it, and captured more of American life than any other composer. Bix Beiderbecke, the doomed cornet prodigy who showed white musicians that they too could make an important contribution to the music; Benny Goodman, the immigrants' son who learned the clarinet to help feed his family, but who grew up to teach a whole country how to dance; Billie Holiday, whose distinctive style routinely transformed mediocre music into great art; Charlie Parker, who helped lead a musical revolution, only to destroy himself at thirty-four; and Miles Davis, whose search for fresh ways to sound made him the most influential jazz musician of his generation, and then led him to abandon jazz altogether. Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Artie Shaw, and Ella Fitzgerald are all here; so are Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and a host of others.

But Jazz is more than mere biography. The history of the music echoes the history of twentieth-century America. Jazz provided the background for the giddy era that F. Scott Fitzgerald called the Jazz Age. The irresistible pulse of big-band swing lifted the spirits and boosted American morale during the Great Depression and World War II. The virtuosic, demanding style called bebop mirrored the stepped-up pace and dislocation that came with peace. During the Cold War era, jazz served as a propaganda weapon—and forged links with the burgeoning counterculture. The story of jazz encompasses the story of American courtship and show business; the epic growth of great cities—New Orleans and Chicago, Kansas City and New York—and the struggle for civil rights and simple justice that continues into the new millennium.]]> 512 Geoffrey C. Ward 0679765395 Johnisha 0 currently-reading 4.16
author: Geoffrey C. Ward
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/14
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,� she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Johnisha 5 3.53 2024
author: Danzy Senna
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/10/13
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]]> 25489025
Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.]]> 188 Han Kang 0553448188 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.62 2007
author: Han Kang
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 202102049 From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, here is a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome, foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens, and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German grandmother, and her dashing, charming uncle who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.

In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life, which she looks back on briefly from adulthood at the novel’s end. Behind the family’s sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncle’s mysterious absences, her German grandmother’s experience of the second world war, her aunt’s misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.]]> 282 Yōko Ogawa 0593316088 Johnisha 4 3.74 2006
author: YĹŤko Ogawa
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/08
date added: 2024/10/08
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]]> 197449267 A sweeping and evocative memoir from the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, Grammy Award–winning, platinum selling singer-songwriter Michael McDonald, written with his friend, Emmy Award–nominated actor, comedian, and #1 New York Times bestselling author Paul Reiser.

Doobie Brothers. Steely Dan. Chart topping soloist. Across a half-century of American music, Michael McDonald’s unmistakably smooth baritone voice defined an era of rock and R&B with hit records like “What A Fool Believes,� “Takin� It to the Streets,� “I Keep Forgettin�,� “Peg,� “It Keeps You Running,� “You Belong to Me,� and “Yah Mo B There.�

In his candid, freewheeling memoir, written with his friend, the Emmy Award-nominated actor and comedian Paul Reiser, Michael tells the story of his life and music. A high school dropout from Ferguson, Missouri, Michael chased his dreams in 1970’s California, a heady moment of rock opportunity and excess. As a rising session musician and backing vocalist, a series of encounters would send him on a wild ride around the world and to the heights of rock stardom—from joining Steely Dan and becoming a defining member of The Doobie Brothers to forging a path as a breakout solo R&B artist.

Interwoven with the unforgettable tales of the music, Michael tells a deeply affecting story of losing and finding himself as a man. He reckons with the unshakeable insecurities that drove him, the drug and alcohol addictions that plagued him, and the highs and lows of popularity. Along the way he relays the lessons he’s learned, and that if he’s learned anything at all it’s that there’s often little correlation between what you get and what you deserve.

Filled with unbelievable stories and a matchless cast of music greats including James Taylor, Ray Charles, Carly Simon, and Quincy Jones, What a Fool Believes is a moving and entertaining memoir that is sure to be a classic.]]> 336 Michael McDonald 0063357569 Johnisha 5 3.96 2024
author: Michael McDonald
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/05
date added: 2024/10/05
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]]> 195610307 360 Betsy Phillips Johnisha 3 4.22
author: Betsy Phillips
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.22
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/10/02
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I’m glad that someone followed the trail on these domestic terror events, but if I am being honest, this was a bit hard to follow at times because of the writing style. I gave it a three because of the subject matter.
]]> 218028690 A piece of paper with a previously undisclosed truth has the power to bring you to your knees.

For four decades, Johnisha Matthews Levi believed a conventional story about her birth, picturing her happy parents at the hospital together. While sorting through her late mother's belongings, however, she discovered a document indicating that her father was instead serving time in Lorton Correctional Complex. This revelation, along with rumors about an FBI investigation of her deceased parents' "private business," leads Levi to unearth the hidden history of her family. She ties this story to public policy, demonstrating how state lottery legalization and the War on Drugs disrupted the Black institutions and communities in Washington, DC.

Levi's stirring memoir centers on her brilliant but troubled father, a Black World War II radioman who, facing economic barriers after his naval service, reinvents himself as a "numbers man" for an underground gambling operation. The job enables John Matthews to provide for his loved ones and to achieve a level of success far beyond his childhood dreams in the impoverished Jim Crow South. In the process, he becomes an indirect target of law enforcement.

By examining the circumstances of her father's incarceration, Levi explores how multiple generations of the Matthews family have been haunted by the specter of violence against Black people. Number's Up offers a unique but quintessentially American story of survival through ingenuity as it Is forgiveness the sole means of moving forward?]]> 254 Johnisha Levi 1985902575 Johnisha 5 5.00
author: Johnisha Levi
name: Johnisha
average rating: 5.00
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rating: 5
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]]> 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.51 2024
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 54469282
The Lie that Binds is the indispensable account of how the formerly non-partisan, back-burner issue of abortion rights was reinvented as the sharp point of the spear for a much larger reactionary movement bent on maintaining control in a changing world. Written by NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue and Research Director Ellie Langford, The Lie that Binds traces the evolution of some of the most dangerous and least understood forces in U.S. politics, offering an unflinchingly incisive analysis of the conservative political machinery designed to thwart social progress � all built around the foundational lie that their motivations are based in moral convictions about individual pregnancies.

This book introduces the colorful cast of characters behind the Radical Right � from anti-ERA protestors to men’s rights activists � and explains how conservative political operatives intentionally targeted abortion as a rallying cry for their followers as their other prejudices fell from favor. Abortion acted as a Trojan horse to move a deeply unpopular, regressive policy agenda.

Hogue and Langford’s deeply-researched investigation is an essential primer for political observers, journalists, and engaged citizens, pulling back the curtain on how this extremist operation drives our politics and threatens our democracy. Read it and learn the truth behind the lie that binds the radical right together.]]> 0 Ilyse Hogue Johnisha 4 4.46 2020
author: Ilyse Hogue
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/30
date added: 2024/09/30
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]]> 195790616
In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.

Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.]]> 368 Michael Waters 0374609810 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.43 2024
author: Michael Waters
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> 19400569 In the city where dining is a sport, a gourmand swears off restaurants (even takeout!) for two years, rediscovering the economical, gastronomical joy of home cooking Gourmand-ista Cathy Erway's timely memoir of quitting restaurants cold turkey speaks to a new era of conscientious eating. An underpaid, twenty-something executive assistant in New York City, she was struggling to make ends meet when she decided to embark on a Walden- esque retreat from the high-priced eateries that drained her wallet. Though she was living in the nation's culinary capital, she decided to swear off all restaurant food. The Art of Eating In chronicles the delectable results of her twenty-four-month experiment, with thirty original recipes included. What began as a way to save money left Erway with a new appreciation for the simple pleasure of sharing a meal with friends at home, the subtleties of home-cooked flavors, and whether her ingredients were ethically grown. She also explored the anti-restaurant underground of supper clubs and cook-offs, and immersed herself in an array of alternative eating lifestyles from freeganism and dumpster-diving to picking tasty greens on a wild edible tour in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Culminating in a binge that leaves her with a foodie hangover, The Art of Eating In is a journey to savor.Watch a Video]]> 338 Cathy Erway 1101185295 Johnisha 4 food-writing-other 3.42 2010
author: Cathy Erway
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: food-writing-other
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]]> 203164398 #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER � In her inspiring, intimate memoir, the first Black woman to ever be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States chronicles her extraordinary life story.

With this unflinching account, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson invites readers into her life and world, tracing her family’s ascent from segregation to her confirmation on America’s highest court within the span of one generation.

Named “Ketanji Onyika,� meaning “Lovely One,� based on a suggestion from her aunt, a Peace Corps worker stationed in West Africa, Justice Jackson learned from her educator parents to take pride in her heritage since birth. She describes her resolve as a young girl to honor this legacy and realize her dreams: from hearing stories of her grandparents and parents breaking barriers in the segregated South, to honing her voice in high school as an oratory champion and student body president, to graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, where she performed in musical theater and improv and participated in pivotal student organizations.

Here, Justice Jackson pulls back the curtain, marrying the public record of her life with what is less known. She reveals what it takes to advance in the legal profession when most people in power don’t look like you, and to reconcile a demanding career with the joys and sacrifices of marriage and motherhood.

Through trials and triumphs, Justice Jackson’s journey will resonate with dreamers everywhere, especially those who nourish outsized ambitions and refuse to be turned aside. This moving, open-hearted tale will spread hope for a more just world, for generations to come.]]> 432 Ketanji Brown Jackson 0593729900 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.45 2024
author: Ketanji Brown Jackson
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/25
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]]> 62919847 A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.

Gracetown, Florida
June 1950

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.

Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.

The Reformatory is a haunting work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.]]> 576 Tananarive Due 1982188340 Johnisha 5 4.44 2023
author: Tananarive Due
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/25
date added: 2024/09/25
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]]> 209637588
In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen―until now.

The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War―the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War―revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian� for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.

To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy despite its false foundations―and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.]]> 400 Sarah Lewis Johnisha 0 to-read 4.14 2024
author: Sarah Lewis
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/20
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]]> 45358321 One of the most beloved and trusted mindfulness teachers in America offers a lifeline for difficult times: the RAIN meditation, which awakens our courage and heart.

Tara Brach is an in-the-trenches teacher whose work counters today's ever-increasing onslaught of news, conflict, demands, and anxieties--stresses that leave us rushing around on auto-pilot and cut off from the presence and creativity that give our lives meaning.

In this heartfelt and deeply practical book, she offers an antidote: an easy-to-learn four-step meditation that quickly loosens the grip of difficult emotions and limiting beliefs. Each step in the meditation practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) is brought to life by memorable stories shared by Tara and her students as they deal with feelings of overwhelm, loss, and self-aversion, with painful relationships, and past trauma--and as they discover step-by-step the sources of love, forgiveness, compassion, and deep wisdom alive within all of us.]]> 288 Tara Brach 0525522816 Johnisha 4 4.20 2019
author: Tara Brach
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/18
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]]> 18996476 Perfect Pies, National Pie Baking Champion (27 times!) Michele Stuart went back into the kitchen—the same kitchen in Vermont where she first dreamed up the award-winning creations that inspired her to open the popular Michele’s Pies shops. Returning there also meant returning to the cherished pies she learned to bake under her grandmother’s and mother’s watchful eyes, as well as the wonderful cakes, cookies, and other sweet treats that became their family tradition.
Ěý
In her newest cookbook, Perfect Pies & More, Stuart delves deeper into her roots while creating delicious new memories made with love and care. Inside, you’ll find tantalizing recipes—some easy-to-bake, some requiring a bit more finesse—for dozens of her favorite fruit, nut, and cream pies, and so much more.
Ěý
� NEW TWISTS ON OLD FAVORITES: Pineapple-Pomegranate Pie with Coconut Crumb, Orange Creamsicle Pie, Almond Joy Pie
� WHIMSICAL PIES: Thin Mint Chocolate Cookie Pie, Key Lime-Blackberry Chiffon Pie, Cannoli Party Dip Pie
� CRUSTS & TOPPINGS: Pretzel Crust, Oreo Cookie Crust, Walnut Crumb Topping
� COOKIES & BARS: Blondies, Double Chocolate Walnut Cookies, Lemon Crunch Bars
� PERFECT FOR A CUP OF TEA: Applesauce Cake, Double Chocolate Bundt Cake, Cranberry-Orange Walnut Bread
� LOVIN� SPOONFUL: Apple Crisp, Blueberry-Blackberry Turnovers, Bread Pudding
� TOP THIS: Caramel Sauce, Raspberry Glacé, Classic Meringue, Maple Whipped Cream, Chocolate Whipped Cream, Buttercream
Ěý]]> 256 Michele Stuart 034554420X Johnisha 0 to-read 3.57 2013
author: Michele Stuart
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 137935 394 Tananarive Due 0345447344 Johnisha 0 to-read 4.24 2003
author: Tananarive Due
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199798557 A READ WITH JENNA TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK | A Most Anticipated Book from Today, Real Simple, Time, Los Angeles Times, and BookPage

“The book we all need to revive our souls� (Nicole Dennis-Benn): A sweeping family saga about the complicated bond between mothers and daughters, the disappearance of a father, and the long-hidden history of a declining New England mill town.

“A powerful novel about how our family history shapes us, Swift River broke my heart, and then offered me hope.� —Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful

It’s the summer of 1987 in Swift River, and Diamond Newberry is learning how to drive. Ever since her Pop disappeared seven years ago, she and her mother hitchhike everywhere. But that’s not the only reason Diamond stands out: She’s teased relentlessly about her weight, and the fact that since Pop’s been gone, she is the only Black person in all of Swift River. This summer, Ma is determined to declare Pop legally dead so they can collect his life insurance money, get their house back from the bank, and finally move on.

But when Diamond receives a letter from a relative she’s never met, key elements of Pop’s life are uncovered. She is introduced to two generations of African American Newberry women, spanning the 20th century and revealing a much larger picture of prejudice and abandonment, of love and devotion. As pieces of their shared past become clearer, Diamond gains a sense of her place in the world and in her family. But how will what she’s learned of the past change her future?]]> 304 Essie J. Chambers 1668027917 Johnisha 3 3.46 2024
author: Essie J. Chambers
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/08
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]]> 56769541

Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students.


Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden, and many more. Exploring these works through such themes as justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, joy, and mercy allows her to move from her aunt’s love of yellow roses to Gil Scott-Heron’s "Winter in America."


Griffin entwines memoir, history, and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation’s inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.]]> 272 Farah Jasmine Griffin 0393651908 Johnisha 5 4.32 2021
author: Farah Jasmine Griffin
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/03
date added: 2024/09/03
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]]> 43565369 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of �97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting “lost boys� to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart―who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient―into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.]]> 282 Ben Lerner 0374277788 Johnisha 0 to-read 3.51 2019
author: Ben Lerner
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 208971054
Set against the backdrop of Lynchburg, Tennessee, this narrative weaves together a thrilling blend of personal discovery, historical investigation, and the revelation of a story long overshadowed by time. Through extensive research, personal interviews, and the uncovering of long-buried documents, Weaver brings to light not only the remarkable bond between Nearest Green and Jack Daniel but also Daniel’s concerted efforts during his lifetime to ensure Green’s legacy would not be forgotten. This deep respect for his teacher, mentor, and friend was mirrored in Jack's dedication to ensuring that the stories and achievements of Nearest Green's descendants, who continued the tradition of working side by side with Jack and his descendants, would also not be forgotten.

Love & Whiskey is more than just a recounting of historical facts; it's a live journey into the heart of storytelling, where every discovery adds a layer to the rich tapestry of American history. Weaver's pursuit highlights the importance of acknowledging those who have shaped our cultural landscape; yet remained in the shadows.]]> 376 Fawn Weaver 1595911340 Johnisha 4 3.98 2024
author: Fawn Weaver
name: Johnisha
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/08/31
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]]> 48930306 The year’sĚýtop food writing from writers who celebrate the many innovative, comforting, mouthwatering, and culturally rich culinary offerings of our country.“These are stories about culture,â€� writes J. Kenji LĂłpez-Alt in his introduction. “AboutĚýhow food shapes people, neighborhoods, and history.â€� This year’s Best American FoodĚýWriting captures the food industry at a critical moment in history â€� from the confrontationĚýof abusive kitchen culture, to the disappearance of the supermarkets, to the rise andĚýfall of celebrity chefs, to the revolution of baby food. Spanning from New York’s premierĚýrestaurants to the chile factories of New Mexico, this collection lifts a curtain on how foodĚýarrives on our plates, revealing extraordinary stories behind what we eat and how we live.

THE BEST AMERICAN FOOD WRITING 2020 INCLUDESĚý
BURKHARD BILGER,ĚýKAT KINSMAN,ĚýLAURA HAYES, TAMAR HASPEL,ĚýSHO SPAETH,ĚýTIM MURPHY and others]]> 272 J. Kenji LĂłpez-Alt 0358344581 Johnisha 3 4.04 2020
author: J. Kenji LĂłpez-Alt
name: Johnisha
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/29
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves:
review:

]]>