In The War Before the War, Andrew Delbanco shares the stories of freedom seekers and shows how they were instrumental in bringing attention to the horrors of slavery.
Hannah Durkin’s authoritative The Survivors of the Clotilda cuts through the myths around the notorious last slave ship to dock in the United States.
Crystal Wilkinson’s tender Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts collects the memories and recipes of her Black Appalachian forebears.
Rhaina Cohen’s The Other Significant Others offers an insightful, intimate look at how deep, abiding platonic relationships shape our lives—no romance necessary.
Jean Hall’s Breathe is an excellent, easy-to-browse resource to get your breathing back on track.
Novelist, essayist, humorist and critic Sloane Crosley shows a remarkable willingness to face the dark questions that follow a suicide.
The newest title in the Yale University Press Black Lives series, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is the first comprehensive biography of the titular civil rights icon and congressman. Drawing on archival materials and interviews with Lewis and his friends, family and associates, Raymond Arsenault offers an essential, mesmerizing narrative of a man who never lost sight of his vision for a just society, and whose legacy continues to inspire generations to “get in the way.”
James Patterson and Peter de Jonge have collaborated before on Miracle at St. Andrews and other novels about golf, and they join forces again with a biography that documents the rise and fall of Tiger Woods.
Aarathi Prasad’s entertaining and enlightening history of silk brims with story and scientific detail, revealing a surprising history well worth knowing.
Biographer Susan Page paints a colorful portrait of trailblazer Barbara Walters in her compulsively readable The Rulebreaker.
Saying “no judgment” is a cover for our desire to judge, posits Lauren Oyler. As a cultural critic for the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s and other such publications, Oyler is in the business of judging, and she doesn’t hold back in her debut collection of essays. TED Talks, Goodreads reviewers, the “vulnerability” trend, that thing Martin Scorsese said about Marvel—her takes would be dizzying if she were not so skilled in constructing solid arguments that deepen our understanding of cultural criticism. No Judgment is deeply funny and wise.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Harvard introductory course in African American Studies is legendary. Who among us would hesitate to attend a lecture with the award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist and cultural critic? The Black Box distills the lessons of the seminar as Gates tracks the Black authors who have sought self-definition through writing across genres to create places of belonging.
Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi’s new anthology offers a look at the human toll of Iran’s authoritarian regime, and a people’s heroic, ongoing movement against it.
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