Cultural & Regional

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....

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

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

He was a husband, a father, a preacher - and the preeminent leader of a movement that continues to transform?

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

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....

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....

The true story of a couple who lost everything and embarked on a transformative journey walking the South West Coast Path in England, The Salt Path is ultimately a portrayal of home - how it can be lost, rebuilt, and rediscovered in the most unexpected ways....

The Worlds I See is the moving memoir of a scientist coming of age as an immigrant in America who finds her calling at the forefront of the AI revolution.

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.

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....

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

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.

From New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth Dowling Taylor comes this riveting chronicle of a critical yet overlooked chapter in American history: the inspiring rise and calculated fall of the Black elite, from Emancipation through Reconstruction to the Jim Crow Era....

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

The life story of Coretta Scott King - wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and singular 20th-century American civil rights activist - as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to one of her closest friends....

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

A heartfelt, and riveting biography of the short life of a talented young man who escapes the slums of Newark for Yale University only to succumb to the dangers of the streets....

In 1893, Liliuokalani, the Queen of Hawaii, was deposed and five years later her nation became an incorporated territory of the US. Published shortly after these events, Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen is an incredibly personal history of the islands that she was born to rule....

In this powerful new collection of oil paintings and stories, President George W. Bush spotlights the inspiring journeys of America’s immigrants and the contributions they make to the life and prosperity of our nation....

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....

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

This inspirational New York Times best seller chronicles the lifelong friendship between a busy sales executive and a disadvantaged young boy and how both of their lives were changed by what began as one small gesture of kindness....

Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The story of Thurgood Marshall's defense - depsite death threats and KKK intimidation - of four Black youths falsely accused of rape....

Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies....

Like much of North Korea, Songmi Han lived in desperate poverty. As a child, she and her family endured extreme hardship, with many meals consisting of little more than grass. Domestic abuse, grueling physical labor, emotional abuse, and hunger were constant in her life. School was out of the question, and she and her mother stole food to survive. Greenlight to Freedom: A North Korean Daughter’s Search for Her Mother and Herself, written by Songmi Han and Casey Lartigue Jr., recounts Songmi’s childhood and escape from North Korea in a perilous and gripping narrative.

Omo Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather's sermons and the writings of his father, the civil rights activist Bob Moses. The result is a powerful chorus of voices that spans 3 generations of an African American family, all shining a light on the Black experience, all calling fiercely for racial justice. This book is at once a coming-of-age story, a multigenerational family memoir, an epic father-son road trip, a searing account of the Black male experience, and a work that powerfully revives Rev. Moses’s demand for liberation.

Razeen Sally was born to a Sri Lankan Muslim father and a Welsh mother. Just before his teens, a political conflict tore his family apart and he left Sri Lanka, barely going back for thirty years. When he finally returned ‘home’, he spent much of the next decade crisscrossing the island, trying to understand this paradoxical place. Blessed with nature’s bounty and an easy, pleasure-loving people, it was nevertheless scarred by ethnic conflict and the violence of civil war.

Rory Cellan-Jones knew he was the child of a love affair between two BBC employees. But until his mother, Sylvia, died and he found a file labelled 'For Rory' he had no idea of their beginnings or ending. Or why his peculiarly isolated childhood had so tested the bond between him and Sylvia, who was single-parenting two sons in a one-bedroom fl at while working full time through the Fifties and Sixties. 'For Rory,' his mother had written on the file before she died, 'in the hope that it will help him understand how it really was ...'

My aim is to shed light on the transformative power of God's redemption through my own journey. While many understand the principles of redemption academically, confusion often arises when life's challenges confront believers. For those who've relinquished dreams to shame, I invite you into my journey—from earliest memories to ministry failure and eventual restoration, in hopes of offering solace and understanding to those who have lost their way. Let my experiences illuminate the path to understanding and embracing the transformative grace of God in every pitfall and setback life presents.

The story of a girl's struggle to accept her disabilities and how she came to understand God's Word and to live her life for Him.

Set in the Upper Snake River Valley in rural Idaho, this story is about relationships. Beginning in the 1970’s and spanning four generations of life on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, it is a study of friendship, fatherhood, and a dog named Bradley. It is a tale of love and loss through the eyes of the author.

Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age twenty-seven. For the next three decades, it's as if Enayat never existed at all. Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat's long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat.

This in-depth work by historian Cheryl C. D. Hughes lets listeners inhabit the postwar America where Bishop Fulton Sheen thrived, in order to reveal what made him such a magnetic figure in his own era. It peers into the complex lives of the celebrities and fallen stars who saw in the warm, brilliant bishop a sign of God’s grace, and it offers a study in the inner dynamics of conversion.

This is the life story of a naughty and rebellious boy who grew up in extreme poverty in the dusty alleys of the Jewish ghetto in Tehran, made his way to a kibbutz in Israel, went through hair-raising adventures in the underworld of Berlin, smuggled people from East Berlin and was expelled from the city as well as from West Germany, and after many hardships achieved impressive success in the United States.