Showing results by narrator "Lynnette R. Freeman" in All Categories

With her holistic approach to filling your life with comfort, balance, and peace, Debrena Jackson Gandy debunks society's myth that doing something for yourself is decadent and selfish. In fact, she says, the joy we gain from treating ourselves--whether to a luxuriant bath or to a meditative hour alone--is transferred to the people in our lives. When we emerge rejuvenated, others benefit from a patient mother, a fulfilled wife, an effective coworker, a solidly grounded friend.

Award-winning author Wanda Morris returns with a powerful, haunting thriller following a lawyer who after the mysterious disappearance of a local landowner and the death of his sister just months before, uncovers a conspiracy that dates back to Reconstruction and persists in half the United States today.

Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history and dreaming of a loving future. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters.

Everyone wants a ticket to Futureland, where you can literally live out your wildest dreams. Want to step inside your favorite video game? Go pro in a sports arena? Perform at a real live concert? Grab your ticket and come right in.

It was supposed to be the highlight of her career, the pinnacle for which she’d worked all her life. And as Hattie McDaniel took the stage in 1940 to claim an honor that would make her the first African-American woman to win an Academy Award, she tearfully took her place in history. Between personal triumphs and tragedies, heartbreaking losses, and severe setbacks, this historic night of winning best supporting actress for her role as the sassy Mammy in the controversial movie Gone With the Wind was going to be life-changing. Or so she thought.

A leading sociologist reveals why racial inequality persists in the workplace despite today’s multi-billion-dollar diversity industry—and provides actional solutions for creating a truly equitable, multiracial future.

Originally published forty years ago, Alice Walker’s first collection of nonfiction is a dazzling compendium that remains both timely and relevant. In these thirty-six essays, Walker contemplates her own work and that of other writers, considers the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and writes vividly and courageously about a scarring childhood injury.

The iconic Black hood, like slavery and Jim Crow, is a peculiar American institution animated by the ideology of white supremacy. Politicians and people of all colors propagated “ghetto” myths to justify racist policies that concentrated poverty in the hood and created high-opportunity white spaces. In White Space, Black Hood, Sheryll Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste - boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance - and unpacks its current legacy....

Cora was born with a veil. She is able to discern spirits and wield the power of both the dark and the light as well as the ability to heal. Her grandmother, Mi, called it The Knowing. Cora has carried it as both a prophetic blessing and a curse, struggling under the burden until one decision changes her world. Possessed with a healer’s compulsion to help, she is unable to turn away when Fannie arrives on her doorstep, ripped, torn, and hanging precariously on the knife’s edge of death.

I’m coming for the children. Minister Jude Morgan has a strong relationship with the Lord but doesn’t know what the latest message means. He is determined to intercede for his young mentee, Carlton Oliver, and children worldwide. Nine-year-old Carlton wants to get to know his estranged dad, but at what cost? He’s about to discover many things he doesn’t know about the man who fathered him, and he’s on a mission to worship the Lord. Sinclaire Oliver regrets getting her ex, Harrison Wakefield, involved in her life and that of his son Carlton.

Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina, by a Black nurse who declares, “Lord Jesus, if that ain’t the blackest little baby born this side of heaven.” Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors’ promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi’s red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior, his son and Lottie Rebecca’s father, born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the post Korean War GI Bill promises prosperity.

Three strong-willed women—Reece, a successful attorney engaged to a handsome dentist; Maxie, a former foster child turned struggling journalist desperate to find her long-lost siblings; and Charlotte, an ambitious real estate agent confronting shocking news—encounter the ups and downs of life as they search for true love and fulfillment.

In Nothing Like a Dame, theater journalist Eddie Shapiro opens a jewelry box full of glittering surprises, through in-depth conversations with twenty leading women of Broadway. He carefully selected Tony Award-winning stars who have spent the majority of their careers in theater, leaving aside those who have moved on or occasionally drop back in. The women he interviewed spent endless hours with him, discussing their careers, offering insights into the iconic shows, changes on Broadway over the last century, and the art (and thrill) of taking the stage night after night.

Lila Bonnard has left her island home in the Caribbean to join the faculty as a visiting professor at Mayfield College in a small Vermont town. On her way from the airport to Mayfield, Lila witnesses the fatal shooting of a Black man by the police. It turns out that the victim was a professor at Mayfield, and was giving CPR to a white woman who was on the verge of an opioid overdose. The two Black faculty and a Black administrator in the otherwise all-white college expect Lila to be a witness in the case against the police.

George Washington Carver was determined to help the people he loved. Born enslaved in Missouri, he left home in search of an education, eventually earning his master’s degree. When Booker T. Washington invited Carver to start the agricultural department at the all-Black-staffed Tuskegee Institute, Carver found his calling. He spent the rest of his life seeking solutions to poverty among landless Black farmers by developing new uses for soil-replenishing crops such as peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes.

Black Flora is the first book to feature profiles of contemporary Black experts innovating in the world of flowers. Author and longtime gardener, Teresa Speight, offers a beautiful intersection of flowers and community. This book is a homecoming, one that unearths the floral legacies of the past and present, while providing a source of inspiration for younger generations of plant-lovers seeking examples of successful Black floral artists and entrepreneurs.

Writers are witnesses and scribes to society’s conscience but writing about social issues in the twenty-first century requires a new, sharper toolkit. Craft and Conscience helps writers weave together their narrative craft, analytical and research skills, and their conscience to create prose which makes us feel the individual and collective impact of crucial issues of our time. Kavita Das guides writers to take on nuanced perspectives and embrace intentionality through a social justice lens.

Uplifting and authentic, My Divine Natural Hair: Inspiration and Tips to Love and Care for Your Crown helps Black women embrace the God-created beauty of natural hair through inspirational readings and salon chair guidance on how to heal, consistently care for, and grow their coils.

When the How to Catch Kids stumble upon a trail of glitter and the entrance to an enchanted garden, they decide that they have to explore! Hoping to find the resident Garden Fairy to learn about her magical realm, our heroes set off on a whirlwind adventure through this larger-than-life garden.

After Futureland emerges from back-to-back scandals, Cam Walker and his family are ready to confront the people who keep targeting their flying park. A group called the Architects has been after them since Futureland made its Atlanta stop, and the Walkers have had enough. To settle things, the Architects propose the very first Architect Games, where the Walkers and the Architects will battle in a series of challenges. If the Walkers win, then the Architects will leave them alone once and for all.