Showing results by narrator "Allyson Johnson" in All Categories

What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young Black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness? This collection of reports and essays explores police violence against Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures.

As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Camille T. Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then a toddler. As they travel, Dungy is intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child but as Black females. With a poet's eye, she celebrates the particular in the universal, such as a child's acquisition of language and what to pack in a diaper bag.

They were sent to investigate the first extraterrestrial signal. What they found was beyond anything they could have imagined - or feared. On a voyage to a mysterious moon in the Alpha Centauri system, the UEA Centaurus meets with disaster. Only the quick thinking of the flight engineer, Rachel Terman, saves some of the crew. Crash-landing on the moon, trillions of kilometers from Earth, they struggle to carry out their mission and try to survive. But nothing has prepared them for what they will face.

From the glaciers of the Alps to the towering cumulonimbus clouds of the Caribbean and the unexpectedly chaotic flows of the North Atlantic, Waters of the World is a tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space. A prerequisite for the discovery of global warming and climate change, this idea was forged by scientists studying water in its myriad forms. This is their story.

Lost in Language & Sound is a vibrant and vital collection that celebrates the three most important muses in the life and work of Ntozake Shange - language, music, and dance. In this deeply personal book, the celebrated writer reflects on what it means to be an artist, a woman, and a woman of color through a beautiful combination of memoir and essay. She describes where her love for creative forces began - in her childhood home, a place where imagination reigned and boredom wasn't allowed.

It all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather, Jules Strauss: Renoir, Monet, Degas, Tiepolo, and more.

Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid.

Despite all good intentions, the lure of the Talent to move through space using the M'hir dimension is too much for the Om'ray of Cersi to resist. As the awareness of this talent spreads, all those Om'ray who are capable converge on the settlement at Sona. To prevent the disruption of the Agreement and the destruction that it would unleash, the M'hiray, as they now call themselves, agree to leave Cersi forever and try to establish their own haven within the Trade Pact worlds - only to learn that not everybody wants peace.

Farrah Grant knew one thing when she opened the Vampire Matchmaking Agency. Her life as a vampire was nothing like the movies. Limited in options by the Order of the Immortals' laws, the dating pool had become increasingly narrow. To remedy this, she opened the VMA. Although she helped dozens of supernatural beings find love, she was beginning to think her own love situation was hopeless.

Some locales seem to come with their own soundtrack. Don Ho and his tiny bubbles provide the background music for Hawaii, Edith Piaf for Paris. The reggae of Bob Marley evokes Jamaica. The soundtrack for Alabama is without question provided by our troubled troubadour Hank Williams. The 2016 biography Hank by Mark Ribowsky paints a dark picture of the musician's short, alcoholic, drug-filled life: a life of loneliness and pain. He goes so far as to call Hank's life story "noir-ish"....

While walking to school one day, Andy meets a lion and soon makes a new friend. A tale of gratitude and helping out our neighbors, children of all ages will love this retelling of the classic folktale "Androcles and the Lion".

Born in the mid-nineteenth century, Sophie Lyons was a master thief, con artist, blackmailer and smuggler. Much of her success as a criminal was due to the fact that she was fearless, reckless, sharp and cunning—everything a woman of her time was not supposed to be. As a young child, Sophie’s parents forced her to steal when she showed a talent for pickpocketing. Strong-willed and smart, she blossomed into a beautiful teenager who caught the eye of many men in the underworld of New York City.

The Burden, edited by award-winning Detroit newspaper columnist Rochelle Riley, is a powerful collection of essays that create a chorus of evidence that the burden is real. The Burden expresses the voices of well-known Americans, such as actor/director Tim Reid who compares slavery to a cancer diagnosis, and former Detroit News columnist Betty DeRamus who recounts the discrimination she encountered as a young Black Detroiter in the south.

Katya deals in Authenticities, trading on nostalgia for a past long gone. But when she encounters a stranger who calls himself Johnny in the woods - even she can't say whether it's real or not.

Dr. Alice Cameron is a famous scientist - an archeoastronomer - devoted to studying ancient Mayan culture. The era driving her career has always been the end of the Mayan baktun, so she's on the Yucatan Peninsula in December 2012 with her daughter Nixie...and so are fellow serious scholars, plenty of end-of-the-world crazies, and - at an international summit - the President of the United States and other heads of state.

Having come of age on the mob-controlled streets of 1960s South Philly, Detective Pete Coletti learned early to walk the fine line between cops and criminals - a skill that served him well during his eighteen years in homicide. Now nearing the end of his illustrious career, the highly decorated Coletti seems to be on the top of his world. But Coletti is harboring a terrible secret.

In Coming to Our Senses, cognitive scientist Viki McCabe argues that prevailing theories of perception, cognition, and information cannot explain how we know the world around us. Using scientific studies and true stories, McCabe shows that the ecological disasters, political paralysis, and economic failures we now face originate in our tendency to privilege cognitive processes and products over the information we access with our perceptual systems.

For Olivia Shaw, the danger of her assignments as a deadly Whisper agent is matched only by that of her hidden status: Liv is one of the caricae, extremely rare women capable of bearing children and therefore controlled by the Syndicate's government. When her handler sends her into the Quillian Empire, her mission is complicated by stumbling upon a kidnapping in progress.

Leslie Durant, owner of Pretty Paws, doesn't care that she's always giving all of her time and attention to others: It's worth the joy of helping abandoned animals find loving forever homes. But if she can't find a way to bring more money into the struggling shelter, the sacrifices she's made will all be for nothing. Then her brother leaves her with an inheritance, with two stipulations: She must work with her estranged mother to host a successful charity event and find a loving home for Peter's dog, Kiwi.

As a Shadowchaser, Kira Solomon has been trained to serve the Light, dispatch the Fallen, and prevent the spread of chaos. Its a deadly job, and Kira knows the horror of spilling innocent blood. But now she has a new role, as the Hand of Maat, the Egyptian Goddess of Truth and Order, and an assignment that might just redeem her.