Cultural & Regional

Award-winning comedian Zarna Garg turns her astonishing life story into a hilarious memoir, spilling all the chai on her wild ride from escaping an arranged marriage and homelessness in India to carving her own path in America and launching a dazzling second act in midlife.

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

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

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

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

Problem Child is the unbelievably true story of Terrell Carter, an American musician and actor who grew up in Buffalo, New York, in a dysfunctional family, each member crazier than the next....

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

Helene Hadsell was "the woman who won every contest prize she desired". In Contesting: The Name It & Claim It Game, she shares her winning secrets in the vibrant, warm, and folksy manner that was uniquely her....

The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African American of the 19th century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era....

With echoes of Educated and The Glass Castle, How to Say Babylon is a “lushly observed and keenly reflective chronicle” (The Washington Post), brilliantly recounting the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid religious upbringing and navigate the world on her own terms.

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

A thrilling, intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know....

From the governor of Maryland, the true story of two kids with the same name: One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison.

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

The National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

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

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

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

Tracing the birth of a revolutionary, Huey P. Newton's famous and oft-quoted autobiography is as much a manifesto as a portrait of the inner circle of America's Black Panther Party.

When Victor Villaseñor stood at the podium and looked at the group of teachers amassed before him, he became enraged. He had never spoken in public before. His mind was flooded with childhood memories filled with humiliation....

Provocative, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest, My Grandfather's Son is the story of one of America's most remarkable and controversial leaders, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told in his own words....

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

Booker T. Washington fought his way out of slavery to become an educator, statesman, political shaper and proponent of the "do it yourself" idea....

The definitive biography of a legendary athlete. The Shrug. The Shot. The Flu Game. When most people think of him, they think of his beautiful shots with the game on the line, his body totally in sync with the ball - hitting nothing but net....

The star of Orange Is the New Black and Jane the Virgin presents her personal story of the real plight of undocumented immigrants in this country....

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads. Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

Five years ago, Lonnae O’Neal grabbed some seeds for her backyard garden, including seeds for Bibb lettuce. She had no idea how deeply she’d wind up digging, or how far she would travel. Lonnae’s fourth great-grandmother, Keziah, was enslaved by the Kentucky Bibb family, including John Bigger Bibb, who developed the Bibb lettuce strain, which remains a culinary darling more than 150 years later.

Just after turning forty, Steve Grove left Silicon Valley as a Google executive to move to his home state of Minnesota with his wife and fellow tech exec, Mary Grove, and their one-year-old twins. Gone from the Midwest for two decades, Grove returned home with fresh eyes. Yearning to put down new roots, he traded his career at Google for a position in state government with Governor Tim Walz. Far from working at a fast-paced tech company, Grove’s shift to leading a large government bureaucracy brought a sequence of struggles and triumphs vividly portrayed with both humor and affection.

An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature.

The only child of a sheet-metal worker and a dinner lady who worked at the canteen of the local school, Geoff Dyer grew up in a world shaped by memories of the Depression and the Second World War. But far from being a story of hardship overcome, this loving memoir is a celebration of opportunities afforded by the post-war settlement, of which the author was an unconscious beneficiary. The crux comes at the age of eleven with the exam that decided the future of generations of British schoolkids: secondary modern or the transformative possibilities of grammar school?

In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein examines the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries.

Una historia mundial de la costura, el bordado y las personas que han utilizado aguja e hilo para hacer oír su voz. En la Argentina de los años 1970, las madres marchaban con pañuelos en la cabeza bordados con los nombres de sus hijos "desaparecidos".

1980s Albania. The world's most isolated country and "the first atheistic state." Captain Dosti knows that by secretly listening to a Christian radio station he could put his life and the life of his whole family at risk. And yet, he cannot resist. This inspiring story of Berti's journey from Captain Dosti to Pastor Dosti gives us a glimpse of the explosive growth of the early Albanian church after nearly half a decade of repressive atheism and the untiring efforts of Trans World Radio to broadcast the Christian message across closed borders to Albanians.

The Best and the Worst Concert Ever: Why The Warning is Awesome, is an essay about a concert that was, as the title says, the best, and yet the worst concert ever. From writer James J. Caterino. the author of Cool Stuff, Reviews and Essays, True Stories, True Stories 2, Escape to Nowhere, and much more.

その日、僕は出家した、彼女と社会を捨てて――。道元が開いた曹洞宗の本山・永平寺。ひとたび山門を潜れば、そこは娑婆とは別世界。東司（トイレ）にも行鉢（食事）にも厳格な作法がある。新入りは、古参僧侶に罵倒され、規矩を徹底的に叩き込まれる。