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WATCH: Amanda Gorman reads inauguration poem, 'The Hill We Climb'

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I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

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Yet Do I Marvel Poem by Countee Cullen - Poem Hunter

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I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kindAnd did He stoop to quibble could tell whyThe little buried mole continues blind,Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,Make plain the reason tortured TantalusIs baited by the fickle fruit, declareIf merely brute caprice dooms SisyphusTo struggle up a never-ending stair.Inscrutable His ways are, and immuneTo catechism by a mind too strewnWith petty cares to slightly understandWhat awful brain compels His awful hand.Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

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"Who Said It Was Simple" by Audre Lorde.

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"Who Said It Was Simple" by Audre Lorde.

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Who Said It Was Simple by Audre Lorde | Poetry Foundation

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There are so many roots to the tree of anger

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"Won't You Celebrate With me" by Lucille Clifton

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"Won't You Celebrate With me" by Lucille Clifton

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Poetry Everywhere: "won't you celebrate with me" by Lucille Clifton

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Still I Rise- BY Maya Angelou with lyrics

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Listen to Black Oxygen on Spotify. Angela Russell is a Black woman who loves Wisconsin. But sometimes, with so few Black people in the state, she needs a little extra dose of Black Oxygen. A place where she can breathe, connect, and restore by hearing and listening to Black folks in this shared journey of life.

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The History of American Slavery from Slate.

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The History of American Slavery from Slate.

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With the help of acclaimed historians and writers, Rebecca Onion and Jamelle Bouie explore the history of American slavery and examine how the institution came to shape our country's politics, economy, and culture. Don't miss Rebecca and Jamelle's follow-up podcast, Reconstruction. This series was made possible by Slate Plus members.

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New Dawn from the Center for Race and Politics.

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New Dawn from the Center for Race and Politics.

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New Dawn Podcast

The New Dawn podcast is an initiative of the Race and Capitalism project. This project is co-led by CSRPC Faculty Director and Professor of Political Science Michael C. Dawson and Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington Megan Ming Francis.
Episode One: The Gentlemen from MIT
Michael C. Dawson, Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago, in conversation with J. Phillip Thompson, Professor of Urban Planning, and Jason Jackson, Lecturer in the Department of Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, covering the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election and its relationship to race and capitalism.
Episode Two - Dark Times & Black Workers
Michael C. Dawson discusses the state of black workers and unions with Dr. Steven Pitts, Associate Chair of the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center.
Episode Three - Black History: Fighting Selective Amnesia About Race and Capitalism
Michael C. Dawson discusses the historical struggles between advancing social movements and funding activism with Assistant Professor Megan Ming Francis.
Episode Four - Displacement, Capital, and the International Bourgeoisie
Michael C. Dawson engages UC Berkeley Assistant Professor of African American studies, Tianna Paschel, about the parallels between rising populism in Colombia and Brazil and its relationship to domestic politics in the US.
Episode Five - Racial Capitalism: Globalism, Empire, and War
Michael C. Dawson meets with Nikhil Singh, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and Adom Getachew, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago, to discuss the role of colonization and empire in developing the connection between race and capitalism.
Episode Six - The Rise of the Carceral State: Prisoner Organizing, Politicization, and Surplus Labor
Michael C. Dawson talks with Toussaint Losier, Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about the role of prisoner organizing and its influence on local mobilizations and protests.
Episode Seven - Trump's Mafia Capitalism and the Crisis in American Politics
Michael C. Dawson welcomes Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of 3CT at the University of Chicago. For Sunder Rajan, the current Trump administration resembles a form of mafia capitalism and he urges both parties to stop being complicit in the decline of American democracy.
Episode Eight - Bankers and Empire: The Caribbean, Capital, and Race
Michael C. Dawson and Peter Hudson, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UCLA, discuss his new book, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean, and uncovering a lost history of wealth in the Caribbean.
Episode Nine - Reframing Salvadoran Modernity: Race, Power, and Neoliberalism
Michael C. Dawson welcomes to the New Dawn podcast Raul Moreno Campos, Lecturer in Political Science at California State University - Channel Islands. Moreno Campos discusses the development of an authoritarian regime and the Civil War in El Salvador and its implications for global capitalism.
Episode Ten - Flip'n the Script: Michael Dawson, Beyond Linked Fated, and the Roots to Racial Capitalism
In this special episode, Megan Ming Francis, political scientist from the University of Washington, flips the script and engages Michael Dawson about his journey through activism and academia. Ranging from challenging institutions, returning to higher education, and where Dawson sees the state of the discipline since offering the Linked Fate measure and framework.
Epison Eleven - Neoliberalism and/or Neocolonialism in Black Politics?
Michael C. Dawson welcomes Nathan Connolly, Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, to the New Dawn Podcast. In this episode, they discuss the value and utility of theoretically and pragmatically engaging concepts like neoliberalism, on one hand, and neocolonialism, on the other.
Episode Twelve - Neoliberalism and Black Politics - Part II
Lester Spence, Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University, joins the New Dawn Podcast and extends the conversation around using a neoliberal lens and the history of financialization to study black communities.

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New Dawn Podcast | Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture | The University of Chicago

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The New Dawn podcast is an initiative of the Race and Capitalism project. This project is co-led by CSRPC Faculty Director and Professor of Political Science Michael C. Dawson and Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington Megan Ming Francis. Episode One: The Gentlemen from MIT Michael C.

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Historically Black from the National Museum of African American History.

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Historically Black from the National Museum of African American History.

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Objects hold history. They're evocative of stories stamped in time. As part of The Washington Post's coverage of the Smithsonian's new National Museum of African American History and Culture, people submitted dozens of objects that make up their own lived experiences of black history, creating a "people's museum" of personal objects, family photos and more.

The Historically Black podcast brings those objects and their stories to life through interviews, archival sound and music. The Washington Post and APM Reports are proud to collaborate in presenting these rich personal histories, along with hosts Keegan-Michael Key, Roxane Gay, Issa Rae and Another Round hosts Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton.

1619 Some 20 enslaved Africans arrive at Britain's Jamestown colony in Virginia.

1776 Thirteen colonies issue "Declaration of Independence" and establish United States of America.

1788 United States Constitution adopted. It declares enslaved individuals as three-fifths of a person and includes a fugitive slave clause.

1808 Congress bans further importation of slaves.

1820 Missouri Compromise bans slavery north of Missouri's southern border.

1831 Nat Turner leads slave rebellion in Virginia.

1857 U.S. Supreme Court hands down Dred Scott decision, which denies citizenship to slaves, former slaves and their descendants.

1860 Abraham Lincoln elected president.

1861 Civil War begins.

Members of an extended Tennessee family talk about their great, great grandfather, a slave owned by his white, biological father. After emancipation, their ancestor managed to buy a farm. Family members reflect on the strength it took to survive slavery and to prosper in the years that followed. Listen.

1863 President Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation.

1865 Civil War ends. Slavery is abolished by 13th Amendment to Constitution. President Lincoln is assassinated. Ku Klux Klan founded in Pulaski, Tenn.

1866 Congress passes first Civil Rights Act, granting African Americans full citizenship and equal rights to whites. Southern states pass laws known as "Black Codes" to limit black freedom.

1870 Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi (Senate) and Joseph Rainey of South Carolina (House) become the first African Americans elected to Congress.

Born into slavery, William Hooper Councill founded one of the nation's first HBCUs, Alabama A&M University. Negotiating the racial politics of Reconstruction and the dawn of Jim Crow was dangerous work. Councill was a peer of Booker T. Washington's and is remembered for his accommodating stance toward whites. His complicated story helps us understand the times he lived in and the legacy of HBCUs. Listen.

1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes withdraws last Federal troops from South. Reconstruction era ends. Rise of Jim Crow laws enforcing harsh racial segregation in the South.

1881 Booker T. Washington appointed first head of Tuskegee Institute.

1909 W. E. B. Du Bois co-founds National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination."

1914 Marcus Garvey forms Universal Negro Improvement Association, a black nationalist fraternal organization.

1915 Start of the Great Migration; more than six million African Americans move from southern states to the west and north.

1917 United States enters WWI.

1920s The emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, a black social and cultural movement in New York and other communities.

1929 Stock market crash; beginning of Great Depression.

1939 Marian Anderson gives free concert at Lincoln Memorial on Easter, with 75,000 people in attendance.

1941 United States enters WWII after Japanese warplanes bomb Pearl Harbor.

During World War II, a labor shortage obliged the military to hire African American women with mathematical skills to help make complicated computations for warplane designs. This small team of black women faced discrimination but eventually would help NASA astronauts land on the moon. One woman whose grandmother was a "computer" helps tell the story. Listen.

1945 End of WWII.

1947 Jackie Robinson debuts for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

1948 President Harry S. Truman orders desegregation of Armed Forces and use of fair employment practices in federal agencies.

1950 Start of Korean War.

1954 U.S. Supreme Court issues Brown v. Board of Education decision, striking down principal of "separate but equal."

1955 NAACP member Rosa Parks refuses to give up bus seat to white passenger, kicking off Montgomery bus boycott.

1955 Start of American involvement in Vietnam.

1957 Martin Luther King, Jr. is elected president of newly founded Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

1962 Whites at University of Mississippi riot in opposition to registration of a black student named James Meredith.

1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: King delivers "I have a Dream Speech" to massive crowd on the National Mall.

1963 President John F. Kennedy assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

1964 Civil Rights Act signed into law.

1965 Malcolm X assassinated in New York City. Martin Luther King, Jr. leads march from Selma to Montgomery, AL, after civil rights protestors, including John Lewis, were severely beaten in Selma.

1965 Voting Rights Act signed into law.

1965-68 Summer rioting in African American sections of Los Angeles, Newark, Detroit and other U.S. cities.

1967 U.S. Supreme Court hands down Loving v. Virginia ruling, outlawing ban on interracial marriage.

1969 The U.S. lands first man on the moon.

1969 Rep. Shirley Chisholm becomes the first African American woman elected to Congress.

1984 Reverend Jesse Jackson runs for president in Democratic primary, winning one-fourth of votes.

1988 Toni Morrison wins Pulitzer Prize for Beloved.

1991 Start of Gulf War.

The Million Man March of 1995 is recreated through the conversation between a young woman and her father, who attended it. He talks about how the event changed his life, and she recalls what it meant to see a poster of the march hanging on the wall of her father's den since she was a girl. Listen.

1995 Minister Louis Farrakhan hosts Million Man March in Washington, D.C.

2001 Terrorist attack on 9/11; start of war in Afghanistan.

2004 Condoleeza Rice is first African American to serve as U.S. Secretary of State.

2008 Barack Obama elected first African American president of United States.

2015 Supreme Court rules that same-sex marriage is a Constitutional right.

In February 2017, Historically Black was distributed to public radio stations nationwide and heard as a three-part series.

PRODUCERS
Kate Ellis
Stephen Smith

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Historically Black | Podcast | APM Reports

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Hosted by Keegan-Michael Key, Roxane Gay, Issa Rae, Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton.

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nINA's Black History Month playlist 2021

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nINA's Black History Month playlist 2021

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nINA's Black History Month playlist 2021

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nINA's Black History Month playlist 2021

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Some of the sounds that filled the abode of James Baldwin. These songs document the vinyl records left behind at Chez Baldwin after his death in 1987,

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The Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List

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The Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List

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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston

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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston

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Description
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick "A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." -Zadie Smith
One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years-due largely to initial audiences' rejection of its strong black female protagonist-Hurston's classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.

About the Author

Zora Neale Hurston was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist. An author of four novels ( Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937; Moses, Man of the Mountain, 1939; and Seraph on the Suwanee, 1948); two books of folklore ( Mules and Men, 1935, and Tell My Horse, 1938); an autobiography ( Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942); and over fifty short stories, essays, and plays. She attended Howard University, Barnard College and Columbia University, and was a graduate of Barnard College in 1927. She was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida. She died in Fort Pierce, in 1960. In 1973, Alice Walker had a headstone placed at her gravesite with this epitaph: "Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South."

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Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel (Paperback)

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A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick"A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly."

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Description

Both a deeply compelling bestselling novel and an epic milestone of American literature.

Originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.

The book's nameless narrator describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", before retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.

The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, James Joyce, and Dostoevsky.

About the Author

Ralph Ellison was born in Okalahoma and trained as a musician at Tuskegee Institute from 1933 to 1936, at which time a visit to New York and a meeting with Richard Wright led to his first attempts at fiction. Invisible Man won the National Book Award and the Russwurm Award. Appointed to the Academy of American Arts and Letters in 1964, Ellison taught at many colleges including Bard College, the University of Chicago, and New York University where he was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities from 1970 through 1980. Ralph Ellison died in 1994.

Praise For...

"A book of the very first order, a superb book."-Saul Bellow

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Both a deeply compelling bestselling novel and an epic milestone of American literature. Originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.

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Usually Ships in 2-7 Days

Description

The magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning work that brought the wrenching experience of slavery into the literature of our time, enlarging our comprehension of America's original sin.

Upon the original publication of Beloved in 1987, John Leonard wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "I can't imagine American literature without it." Nearly two decades later, The New York Times chose Beloved as the best American novel of the previous fifty years.

Set in post-Civil War Ohio, it is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has withstood savagery and not gone mad. Sethe, who now lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing apparition who calls herself Beloved.

Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in her memory; in Denver's fear of the world outside the house; in the sadness that consumes Baby Suggs; in the arrival of Paul D, a fellow former slave; and, most powerfully, in Beloved, whose childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her.

Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining possession of the present-and to throw off the long-dark legacy of the past-is at the center of this spellbinding novel. But it also moves beyond its particulars, combining imagination and the vision of legend with the unassailable truths of history.

About the Author

TONI MORRISON-who died in 2019-wrote eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Praise For...

"A masterwork. . . . Wonderful. . . . I can't imagine American literature without it." -John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

"A triumph." -Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review

"Toni Morrison's finest work. . . . [It] sets her apart [and] displays her prodigious talent." - Chicago Sun-Times

"Dazzling. . . . Magical. . . . An extraordinary work." - The New York Times

"A masterpiece. . . . Magnificent. . . . Astounding. . . . Overpowering." - Newsweek

"Brilliant. . . . Resonates from past to present." - San Francisco Chronicle

"A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. . . . Read it and tremble." - People

"Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature." - New York Review of Books

"A work of genuine force. . . . Beautifully written." - The Washington Post

"There is something great in Beloved: a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you." - The New Yorker

"A magnificent heroine . . . a glorious book." - The Baltimore Sun

"Superb. . . . A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history. . . . Exquisitely told." - Cosmopolitan

"Magical . . . rich, provocative, extremely satisfying." - Milwaukee Journal

"Beautifully written. . . . Powerful. . . . Toni Morrison has become one of America's finest novelists." - The Plain Dealer

"Stunning. . . A lasting achievement." - The Christian Science Monitor

"Written with a force rarely seen in contemporary fiction. . . . One feels deep admiration." - USA Today

"Compelling . . . . Morrison shakes that brilliant kaleidoscope of hers again, and the story of pain, endurance, poetry and power she is born to tell comes right out." - The Village Voice

"A book worth many rereadings." - Glamour

"In her most probing novel, Toni Morrison has demonstrated once again the stunning powers that place her in the first ranks of our living novelists." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Heart-wrenching . . . mesmerizing." - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Shattering emotional power and impact." - New York Daily News

"A rich, mythical novel . . . a triumph." - St. Petersburg Times

"Powerful . . . voluptuous." - New York

Product Details

ISBN: 9780525659273
ISBN-10: 0525659277
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: October 22nd, 2019
Pages: 288

Categories

Related Editions (all)

Kobo eBook (July 23rd, 2007): $11.99

Paperback (June 8th, 2004): $16.00

Paperback (French) (May 22nd, 2008): $24.95

Hardcover (October 17th, 2006): $27.00

Hardcover (August 12th, 1987): $32.00

Prebound (June 8th, 2004): $28.20

Paperback (June 23rd, 2020): $16.95

Prebound (June 8th, 2004): $28.20

Paperback, Large Print, Large Print (September 29th, 1998): $19.95

Hardcover (September 1st, 1998): $16.95

CD-Audio (March 20th, 2007): $30.00

Paperback (October 1st, 2008): $22.00

Hardcover (Korean) (October 1st, 2019): $40.80

Hardcover (Chinese) (September 1st, 2019): $38.40

Paperback (September 1st, 1988): $12.95

Paperback (March 1st, 1999): $17.75

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The magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning work that brought the wrenching experience of slavery into the literature of our time, enlarging our comprehension of America's original sin. Upon the original publication of Beloved in 1987, John Leonard wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "I can't imagine American literature without it."

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Usually Ships in 2-7 Days

Description

A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK!
Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison powerfully examines our obsession with beauty and conformity-and asks questions about race, class, and gender with her characteristic subtly and grace.
In Morrison's best-selling first novel, Pecola Breedlove-an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others-prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Here, Morrison's writing is "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry" ( The New York Times).

About the Author

Toni Morrison has worked in publishing and has taught at various universities, including Yale, Rutgers, and the State University of New York at Albany as the Schweitzer Chair. She is currently Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1996.

Praise For...

"So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry." - The New York Times

"A profoundly successful work of fiction. . . . Taut and understated, harsh in its detachment, sympathetic in its truth . . . it is an experience." - The Detroit Free Press

"This story commands attention, for it contains one black girl's universe." - Newsweek

Product Details

ISBN: 9780375411557
ISBN-10: 0375411550
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: December 28th, 1993
Pages: 224
Language: English
Series: Oprah's Book Club

Categories

Related Editions (all)

Kobo eBook (July 23rd, 2007): $11.99

Paperback (May 8th, 2007): $14.95

Prebound (May 8th, 2007): $26.90

Prebound (May 8th, 2007): $26.90

Mass Market Paperbound (December 1st, 1972): $3.95

Paperback (September 6th, 2005): $15.95

Paperback (April 26th, 2000): $14.00

Paperback (September 1st, 1994): $14.00

Hardcover (Chinese) (September 1st, 2019): $29.30

Paperback (March 1st, 1999): $17.75

(September 1st, 1994): $22.85

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A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK! Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison powerfully examines our obsession with beauty and conformity-and asks questions about race, class, and gender with her characteristic subtly and grace.

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JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH - Official Trailer

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One Night in Miami... | Official Trailer

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Between the World & Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Between the World & Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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September 2015 Indie Next List

"Coates writes about fear and its corrosive effects on our culture from a very personal perspective. He persuades us that we need a new way of understanding American history, a new story, and new names for ourselves and others in order for humanity to survive and thrive. Between the World and Me is urgently needed and should be required reading for everyone in America: high school and college students, church group members, business people, and especially all law enforcement and justice department personnel. This is a book I wish did not need to be written, but I am grateful to Coates for having the courage to share his views."
- Liza Bernard (M), Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, VT

Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE * PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST * ONE OF OPRAH'S "BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH" * NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT

Hailed by Toni Morrison as "required reading," a bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by "the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race" (Rolling Stone)

NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN * NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * O: The Oprah Magazine * The Washington Post * People * Entertainment Weekly * Vogue * Los Angeles Times * San Francisco Chronicle * Chicago Tribune * New York * Newsday * Library Journal * Publishers Weekly

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men-bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son-and readers-the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Praise For...

"I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates's journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading." -Toni Morrison

"Powerful and passionate . . . profoundly moving . . . a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Really powerful and emotional." -John Legend, The Wall Street Journal

"Extraordinary . . . [Coates] writes an impassioned letter to his teenage son-a letter both loving and full of a parent's dread-counseling him on the history of American violence against the black body, the young African-American's extreme vulnerability to wrongful arrest, police violence, and disproportionate incarceration." -David Remnick, The New Yorker

"Brilliant . . . a riveting meditation on the state of race in America . . . [Coates] is firing on all cylinders, and it is something to behold: a mature writer entirely consumed by a momentous subject and working at the extreme of his considerable powers at the very moment national events most conform to his vision." -The Washington Post

"An eloquent blend of history, reportage, and memoir written in the tradition of James Baldwin with echoes of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man . . . It is less a typical memoir of a particular time and place than an autobiography of the black body in America. . . . Coates writes with tenderness, especially of his wife, child, and extended family, and with frankness. . . . Coates's success, in this book and elsewhere, is due to his lucidity and innate dignity, his respect for himself and for others. He refuses to preach or talk down to white readers or to plead for acceptance: He never wonders why we just can't all get along. He knows government policies make getting along near impossible." -The Boston Globe

"For someone who proudly calls himself an atheist, Coates gives us a whole lot of 'Can I get an amen?' in this slim and essential volume of familial joy and rigorous struggle. . . . [He] has become the most sought-after public intellectual on the issue of race in America, with good reason. Between the World and Me . . . is at once a magnification and a distillation of our existence as black people in a country we were not meant to survive. It is a straight tribute to our strength, endurance and grace. . . . [Coates] speaks resolutely and vividly to all of black America." -Los Angeles Times

"A crucial book during this moment of generational awakening." -The New Yorker

"A work that's both titanic and timely, Between the World and Me is the latest essential reading in America's social canon." -Entertainment Weekly

"Coates delivers a beautiful lyrical call for consciousness in the face of racial discrimination in America. . . . Between the World and Me is in the same mode of The Fire Next Time; it is a book designed to wake you up. . . . An exhortation against blindness." -The Guardian

"Coates has crafted a deeply moving and poignant letter to his own son. . . . [His] book is a compelling mix of history, analysis and memoir. Between the World and Me is a much-needed artifact to document the times we are living in [from] one of the leading public intellectuals of our generation. . . . The experience of having a sage elder speak directly to you in such lyrical, gorgeous prose-language bursting with the revelatory thought and love of black life-is a beautiful thing." -The Root

"Rife with love, sadness, anger and struggle, Between the World and Me charts a path through the American gauntlet for both the black child who will inevitably walk the world alone and for the black parent who must let that child walk away." -Newsday

"Poignant, revelatory and exceedingly wise, Between the World and Me is an essential clarion call to our collective conscience. We ignore it at our own peril." -San Francisco Chronicle

"Masterfully written . . . powerful storytelling." -New York Post

"One of the most riveting and heartfelt books to appear in some time . . . The book achieves a level of clarity and eloquence reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's classic Invisible Man. . . . The perspective [Coates] brings to American life is one that no responsible citizen or serious scholar can safely ignore." -Foreign Affairs

"Urgent, lyrical, and devastating in its precision, Coates has penned a new classic of our time." -Vogue

"Powerful." -The Economist

"A work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty . . . Between the World and Me is a love letter written in a moral emergency, one that Coates exposes with the precision of an autopsy and the force of an exorcism. . . . Coates is frequently lauded as one of America's most important writers on the subject of race today, but this in fact undersells him: Coates is one of America's most important writers on the subject of America today. . . . [He's] a polymath whose breadth of knowledge on matters ranging from literature to pop culture to French philosophy to the Civil War bleeds through every page of his book, distilled into profound moments of discovery, immensely erudite but never showy." -Slate

"The most important book I've read in years . . . an illuminating, edifying, educational, inspiring experience." -Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

"It's an indescribably enlightening, enraging, important document about being black in America today. Coates is perhaps the best we have, and this book is perhaps the best he's ever been." -Deadspin

"Vital reading at this moment in America." -U.S. News & World Report

"[Coates] has crafted a highly provocative, thoughtfully presented, and beautifully written narrative. . . . Much of what Coates writes may be difficult for a majority of Americans to process, but that's the incisive wisdom of it. Read it, think about it, take a deep breath and read it again. The spirit of James Baldwin lives within its pages." -The Christian Science Monitor

"Part memoir, part diary, and wholly necessary, it is precisely the document this country needs right now." -New Republic

"A moving testament to what it means to be black and an American in our troubled age . . . Between the World and Me feels of-the-moment, but like James Baldwin's celebrated 1963 treatise The Fire Next Time, it stands to become a classic on the subject of race in America." -The Seattle Times

"Riveting . . . Coates delivers a fiery soliloquy dissecting the tradition of the erasure of African-Americans beginning with the deeply personal." -Minneapolis Star Tribune

"[ Between the World and Me] is not a Pollyanna, coming-of-age memoir about how idyllic life was growing up in America. It is raw. It is searing. . . . [It's] a book that should be read and shared by everyone, as it is a story that painfully and honestly explores the age-old question of what it means to grow up black and male in America." -The Baltimore Sun

"A searing indictment of America's legacy of violence, institutional and otherwise, against blacks." -Chicago Tribune

"I know that this book is addressed to the author's son, and by obvious analogy to all boys and young men of color as they pass, inexorably, into harm's way. I hope that I will be forgiven, then, for feeling that Ta-Nehisi Coates was speaking to me, too, one father to another, teaching me that real courage is the courage to be vulnerable, to admit having fallen short of the mark, to stay open-hearted and curious in the face of hate and lies, to remain skeptical when there is so much comfort in easy belief, to acknowledge the limits of our power to protect our children from harm and, hardest of all, to see how the burden of our need to protect becomes a burden on them, one that we must, sooner or later, have the wisdom and the awful courage to surrender." -Michael Chabon

"Ta-Nehisi Coates is the James Baldwin of our era, and this is his cri de coeur. A brilliant thinker at the top of his powers, he has distilled four hundred years of history and his own anguish and wisdom into a prayer for his beloved son and an invocation to the conscience of his country. Between the World and Me is an instant classic and a gift to us all." -Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns

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1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE * PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST * ONE OF OPRAH'S "BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH" * NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as &ldqu

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March 2010 Indie Next List

"In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander tirelessly researches both the legal history of America's Jim Crow past and the current legal policies that contribute to the mass incarceration of black people. The text adds significantly to scholarship that contextualizes rates of incarceration among blacks and critiques of social and economic inequality."
- Bruce Smith, Colorado State University Bookstore, Fort Collins, CO

Description
Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly' Slate' Chronicle of Higher Education' Literary Hub, Book Riot' and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller--"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education--with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system."
--Adam Shatz, London Review of Books
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S."

Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

About the Author

Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar. She is a former Ford Foundation Senior Fellow and Soros Justice Fellow, has clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, and has run the ACLU of Northern California's Racial Justice Project. Alexander is a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary and an opinion columnist for the New York Times. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Hardcover)

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Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly' Slate' Chronicle of Higher Education' Literary Hub, Book Riot' and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller--"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education--with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexand

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We Want To Do More Than Survive by Bettina Love

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We Want To Do More Than Survive by Bettina Love

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Description

Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award
Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists.
Drawing on her life's work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.

To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom-not merely reform-teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.

About the Author

Bettina L. Love is an award-winning author and an associate professor of educational theory and practice at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on how teachers and schools working with parents and communities can build communal, civically engaged, antiracist, antihomophobic, and antisexist educational, equitable classrooms. A sought-after public speaker on a range of topics, including hip-hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, hip-hop feminism, art-based education to foster youth civic engagement, and issues of diversity, Love has also provided commentary for news outlets including NPR, the Guardian, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Praise For...

"A useful rejoinder, half a century on, to Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed; deserving of a broad audience among teachers and educational policymakers."
- Kirkus Reviews

"This text is helpful for gaining a better grasp of oppression and what teachers can do about it."
- Library Journal

"Love's new book is uncategorizable in the best way possible. It is memoir, history, indictment, textbook, guide, and manifesto . . . Educators who aspire to activism will find inspiration in the pages of this book."
- Rethinking Schools

"Offering readers a profoundly fresh perspective on teaching, Bettina Love breaks new ground. Using both the language of critical thinking and radical resistance, this book challenges and dares us all to teach for justice."
-bell hooks

"Through unflinching and daring inquiry, Dr. Bettina Love has stepped out on faith to articulate our pain, suffering, and eternal search for joy. Her words resurrect the abolitionist credo of 'education' over 'school.' Because they are two different things, the question remains: can school be the place where education happens or do we need to radically rethink what we're doing? Dr. Love's work suggests that if we do not choose the latter, we are complicit in our own demise."
-David Stovall, professor of African American studies and criminology, law, and justice, University of Illinois at Chicago, and coauthor of Twenty-First-Century Jim Crow Schools

"This book is exactly what we need: a powerful indictment of our education system as an industry that robs dark children of their potential. Dr. Love challenges us to become abolitionists by holding ourselves and our colleagues accountable for our complicity in perpetuating the 'educational survival complex.' As educators, we must recognize the impact of whiteness on our classrooms, demand the impossible, welcome the struggle, and refuse to oppress dark children by calling out racism, recognizing our students' cultures and histories, and showing them they matter to our communities and to our world. This isn't about reform; it's about freedom, and I'm moving from ally to coconspirator. Every educator needs to read this book, to freedom dream, and to challenge oppression with intersectional justice."
-Mandy Manning, 2018 National Teacher of the Year

"This much-needed book is at once personal, analytic, poetic, exacting, and soaring. Dr. Bettina Love brilliantly weaves, in artisanal and scholarly fashion, the threads and fabric of history, the present, and the possible future. She weaves in a way that we are invited to understand what moving past survival means, in personal, communal, and nation-building ways. This book is a call to building a different future: one made for freedom."
-Leigh Patel, author of Decolonizing Educational Research

"This book is a treasure! With rigorous intersectional theory, careful cultural criticism, and brave personal reflection, We Want To Do More Than Survive dares us to dream and struggle toward richer and thicker forms of educational freedom. With the mind of a scholar and the heart of a revolutionary, Bettina Love has penned a book that places her in the tradition of Freire, Giroux, hooks, and Ladson-Billlings. This beautiful text also affirms her position as one of the leading education scholars of her generation."
-Marc Lamont Hill, author of Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

" We Want To Do More Than Survive is endarkened feminist wisdom in dark times. In the tradition of a skilled kente weaver, Dr. Love brings together abolitionist traditions of educational freedom work with contemporary struggles for Black humanity and creates a stunning tribute to the absolute necessity of joy and love in resistance struggles. What sets this book apart is Love's critical understanding that the splendor of kente is seen not in the weaver's individual efforts or strips of cloth, but instead when those pieces are woven together to illuminate our larger narrative as people of color in community. That narrative of Black freedom dreaming is this book you hold in your hands. And it is a must-read for those who love dark people, who love education, and who love the possibilities of educational freedom as intersectional justice right now."
-Cynthia B. Dillard (Nana Mansa II of Mpeasem, Ghana), Mary Frances Early Endowed Professor of Teacher Education, University of Georgia, and author of On Spiritual Strivings: Transforming an African American Woman's Academic Life

"Bettina Love has managed to write a book that is both a love song to our children and a potent weapon. Part memoir, part manual, part manifesto, We Want to Do More Than Survive explains that abolitionist teaching is neither a new set of standards nor a social justice curriculum, but a revolutionary commitment to transforming ourselves, our country, and the world. Written in breathtaking prose and bold cadences, it reminds us that 'mattering' is a verb, and making sure all of our kids truly matter is unfinished business for which we are all responsible. Educator or not, read this book: it is our North Star."
-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

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We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (Paperback)

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Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book AwardDrawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists.Drawing on her life's work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach s

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Fruitvale Station (2013) Official Trailer [HD]

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Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD * "An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far."-Dwight Garner, The New York Times

The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.
NAMED THE #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME MAGAZINEAND ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY People * The Washington Post * Publishers Weekly AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * O: The Oprah Magazine * NPR * Bloomberg * Christian Science Monitor * New York Post * The New York Public Library * Fortune * Smithsonian Magazine * Marie Claire * Town & Country * Slate * Library Journal * Kirkus Reviews * LibraryReads * PopMatters FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH AWARD FOR NONFICTION AND LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD "As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power-which groups have it and which do not."
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people-including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others-she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

About the Author

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns. Her debut work won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and The New York Times 's list of the Best Nonfiction of All Time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.

Praise For...

"Magnificent . . . a trailblazing work on the birth of inequality . . . Caste offers a forward-facing vision. Bursting with insight and love, this book may well help save us." -O: The Oprah Magazine

"This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing. . . . Wilkerson has written a closely argued book that largely avoids the word 'racism,' yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature. . . . It's a book that changes the weather inside a reader." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"A surprising and arresting wide-angle reframing . . . Her epilogue feels like a prayer for a country in pain, offering new directions through prophetic language." -Bilal Qureshi, The Washington Post

"A transformative new framework through which to understand identity and injustice in America." -Justin Worland, Time

"Magisterial . . . Her reporting is nimble and her sentences exquisite. But the real power of Caste lies tucked within the stories she strings together like pearls. . . . Caste roams wide and deep, lives and deaths vividly captured, haloed with piercing cultural critique. . . . Caste is a luminous read, bearing its own torch of righteous wrath in a diamond-hard prose that will be admired and studied by future generations of journalists." -Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Brave, clear and shatteringly honest in both approach and delivery . . . Extrapolating Wilkerson's ideas to contemporary America becomes an unsettling exercise that proves how right she is and how profoundly embedded into society the caste system is. . . . Her quest for answers frames everything and acts as the perfect delivery method for every explanation." -Gabino Iglesias, San Francisco Chronicle

" Caste draws heavily on the powerful mingling of narrative, research, and visionary, sweeping insight that made Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns the definitive contemporary study of African Americans' twentieth-century Great Migration from the Jim Crow South to northern, midwestern, and western cities. It deepens the resonance of that book (a seemingly impossible feat) by digging more explicitly into the pervasive racial hierarchy that transcends region and time." -Steve Nathans-Kelly, New York Journal of Books

" Caste will spur readers to think and to feel in equal measure." -Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Times Book Review

"Wilkerson's book is a powerful, illuminating and heartfelt account of how hierarchy reproduces itself, as well as a call to action for the difficult work of undoing it." -Kenneth W. Mack, The Washington Post

"Should be required reading for generations to come . . . A significant work of social science, journalism, and history, Caste removes the tenuous language of racial animus and replaces it with a sturdier lexicon based on power relationships." -Joshunda Sanders, The Boston Globe

"[ Caste] should be at the top of every American's reading list." -Jennifer Day, Chicago Tribune

"An expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice . . . This is an American reckoning and so it should be. . . . It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time." -Fatima Bhutto, The Guardian

"Full of uncovered stories and persuasive writing . . . Opening up a new bank of language in a time of emboldened white supremacism may provide her readers with a new way of thinking and talking about social injustice. . . . A useful reminder to India's many upper-caste cosmopolitans . . . that dreams of resistance are just one part of the shared inheritance of the world's oldest democracy, and the world's largest." -Supriya Nair, Mumbai Mirror

"It is bracing to be reminded with such precision that our country was built through genocide and slavery. But Ms. Wilkerson has also provided a renewed way of understanding America's longest, fiercest trouble in all its complexity. Her book leaves me both grateful and hopeful. I gulped it down." -Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains

"Like Martin Luther King, Jr. before her, Isabel Wilkerson has traveled the world to study the caste system and has returned to show us more clearly than ever before how caste is permanently embedded in the foundation and unseen structural beams of this old house called America. Isabel Wilkerson tells this story in prose that is so beautiful, the only reason to pause your reading is to catch your breath. You cannot understand America today without this book." -Lawrence O'Donnell

"This enthralling exposé deserves a wide and impassioned readership.""Similar to her previous book, the latest by Wilkerson is destined to become a classic, and is urgent, essential reading for all."
"This is a brilliant book, well timed in the face of a pandemic and police brutality that cleave along the lines of a caste system."

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Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents (Hardcover)

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1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD * "An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far."-Dwight Garner, The New York TimesThe Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives

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October 2019 Indie Next List

"Ta-Nehisi Coates understands something big and he understands it better than anyone else right now. The Water Dancer led me on a journey up and down the landscape of American slavery with a narrative that feels like The Book of Exodus meets, well, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Over 400 pages I have cried, I have laughed, I have been educated, and I have been enlightened. Coates writes with an honesty that can only come from a sublime, even spiritual, understanding of the souls of the white man and the black man in America. Written with poignancy and humanity, The Water Dancer left me stunned but clear-headed, like I had just been woken up from a deep, dream-filled sleep."
- Norris Rettiger, Lemuria Bookstore, Jackson, MS

Winter 2020 Reading Group Indie Next List

"Hiram Walker, the son of a Black woman and her white master, is born into slavery in this rendering of life in antebellum Virginia. But it is the strength of his memories that kindles a special inner gift: the magic of conduction. In the much-anticipated first novel from Coates, Hiram's talent is used by agents of the Underground Railroad to bring runaway slaves north, and also to help make families whole once again. This searing and ultimately uplifting story explores the constructs of family, real or artificial, and the power of memory to bind people together from afar."
- Keith Vient, Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, DC

Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * From the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.

"This potent book about America's most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist."-San Francisco Chronicle

IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE * Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films

NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD * NAMED ONE OF PASTE'S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time * NPR * The Washington Post * Chicago Tribune * Vanity Fair * Esquire * Good Housekeeping * Paste * Town & Country * The New York Public Library * Kirkus Reviews * Library Journal

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her-but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram's resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.

This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children-the violent and capricious separation of families-and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today's most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer isa propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.

"Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations-and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What's most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy." -Rolling Stone

About the Author

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Coates lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Praise For...

"Nearly every paragraph is laced through with dense, gorgeously evocative descriptions of a vanished world and steeped in its own vivid vocabulary." -Entertainment Weekly

"Coates balances the horrors of slavery against the fantastical. He extends the idea of the gifts of the disenfranchised to include a kind of superpower. But The Water Dancer is very much its own book, and its gestures toward otherworldliness remain grounded. In the end, it is a novel interested in the psychological effects of slavery, a grief that Coates is especially adept at parsing. . . . In Coates's world, an embrace can be a revelation, rare and astonishing." -Esi Edugyan, The New York Times Book Review

"The most surprising thing about The Water Dancer may be its unambiguous narrative ambition. This isn't a typical first novel. . . . The Water Dancer is a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. . . . It is flecked with forms of wonder-working that push at the boundaries of what we still seem to be calling magical realism." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"While neither polemical nor wholly fantastical, the story draws on skills [Coates] developed in those other genres. . . . The story's bracing realism is periodically overcome by the mist of fantasy. The result is a budding superhero discovering the dimensions of his power within the confines of a historical novel that critiques the function of racial oppression. . . . Coates isn't dropping supernatural garnish onto The Water Dancer any more than Toni Morrison sends a ghost whooshing through Beloved for cheap thrills. Instead, Coates's fantastical elements are deeply integral to his novel, a way of representing something larger and more profound than the confines of realism could contain." -The Washington Post

"Mythic language pervades the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates. . . . With The Water Dancer . . . we pay witness to a writer unchained . . . a writer finally able to marry novelistic tendencies to the form. . . . The fistfuls of firmament Coates is able to bring back to us are a wonder to behold. . . . The horrors depicted never felt rote or part of any genre rulebook. In highlighting families, Coates made his characters individuals. . . . Elements of the adventure novel, of the heist novel, of the romance are all there. But Coates expertly subverts the expectations each of those labels carries. . . . The book does not lack for scene-stealers. . . . Who is he talking to when he demands remembering? He's talking to us. All of us." -Tochi Onyebuchi, Tordotcom

"Studied and meticulous, the novel is a slave narrative that depicts the quotidian horrors of family separation. Even so, it's remarkably tender: The Water Dancer is also a romance." -The Atlantic

"An experience in taking [Toni] Morrison's 'chances for liberation' literally: What if memory had the power to transport enslaved people to freedom?' . . . The most moving part of The Water Dancer [is] the possibility it offers of an alternate history. . . . The book's most poignant and painful gift is the temporary fantasy that all the people who leaped off slave ships and into the Atlantic were not drowning themselves in terror and anguish, but going home." -NPR

"An electrifying, inventive novel . . . [Coates] loses none of his mastery for conveying complex ideas and blending a deep knowledge of American history with scintillating wordsmanship. . . . His craft shows on every page. He gives this story-and these men and women-the care and space they demand and deserve. . . . A haunting adventure story told through the tough lens of history, The Water Dancer is a quintessentially American story of self-creation, doubt, and elevation." -The Boston Globe

"The best writers-the best storytellers, in particular-possess the enchanting, irresistible power to take the reader somewhere else. Ta-Nehisi Coates imagines the furthest reach of that power as a means to transcend borders and bondage in The Water Dancer, a spellbinding look at the impact of slavery that uses meticulously researched history and hard-won magic to further illuminate this country's original sin. . . . Exploring the loaded issues of race and slavery has become yet more fuel for today's culture wars, but an underlying message of liberation through the embrace of history forms the true subject of The Water Dancer. . . . Coates envisions the transcendent potential in acknowledging and retelling stories of trauma from the past as a means out of darkness. With recent family separations at the U.S. border, this message feels all the more timely." -Los Angeles Times

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1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * From the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom."This potent book about America's most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist."-

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "The story of modern medicine and bioethics-and, indeed, race relations-is refracted beautifully, and movingly."-Entertainment Weekly
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE * ONE OF THE "MOST INFLUENTIAL" (CNN), "DEFINING" (LITHUB), AND "BEST" (THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF THE DECADE * ONE OF ESSENCE'S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS * WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * Entertainment Weekly * O: The Oprah Magazine * NPR * Financial Times * New York * Independent (U.K.) * Times (U.K.) * Publishers Weekly * Library Journal * Kirkus Reviews * Booklist * Globe and Mail
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: The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family-past and present-is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family-especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance?

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

About the Author

REBECCA SKLOOT is an award-winning science writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; and many others. She is coeditor of The Best American Science Writing 2011 and has worked as a correspondent for NPR's Radiolab and PBS's Nova ScienceNOW. She was named one of five surprising leaders of 2010 by the Washington Post. Skloot's debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took more than a decade to research and write, and instantly became a New York Times bestseller. It was chosen as a best book of 2010 by more than sixty media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, People, and the New York Times. It is being translated into more than twenty-five languages, adapted into a young reader edition, and being made into an HBO film produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. Skloot is the founder and president of The Henrietta Lacks Foundation. She has a B.S. in biological sciences and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She has taught creative writing and science journalism at the University of Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University. She lives in Chicago. For more information, visit her website at RebeccaSkloot.com, where you'll find links to follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Praise For...

"One of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I've read in a very long time . . . The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks . . . floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of Erin Brockovich, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Andromeda Strain. . . . It feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write. It signals the arrival of a raw but quite real talent." -Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Skloot's vivid account begins with the life of Henrietta Lacks, who comes fully alive on the page. . . . Immortal Life reads like a novel." -Eric Roston, "Gripping . . . by turns heartbreaking, funny and unsettling . . . raises troubling questions about the way Mrs. Lacks and her family were treated by researchers and about whether patients should control or have financial claims on tissue removed from their bodies." The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fascinating read and a ringing success. It is a well-written, carefully-researched, complex saga of medical research, bioethics, and race in America. Above all it is a human story of redemption for a family, torn by loss, and for a writer with a vision that would not let go." -Douglas Whynott, The Boston Globe

"Riveting . . . raises important questions about medical ethics . . . It's an amazing story. . . . Deeply chilling . . . Whether those uncountable HeLa cells are a miracle or a violation, Skloot tells their fascinating story at last with skill, insight and compassion." -Colette Bancroft, St. Petersburg
"The history of HeLa is a rare and powerful combination of race, class, gender, medicine, bioethics, and intellectual property; far more rare is the writer than can so clearly fuse those disparate threads into a personal story so rich and compelling. Rebecca Skloot has crafted a unique piece of science journalism that is impossible to put down-or to forget." -Seed magazine

"No one can say exactly where Henrietta Lacks is buried: during the many years Rebecca Skloot spent working on this book, even Lacks's hometown of Clover, Virginia, disappeared. But that did not stop Skloot in her quest to exhume, and resurrect, the story of her heroine and her family. What this important, invigorating book lays bare is how easily science can do wrong, especially to the poor. The issues evoked here are giant: who owns our bodies, the use and misuse of medical authority, the unhealed wounds of slavery ... and Skloot, with clarity and compassion, helps us take the long view. This is exactly the sort of story that books were made to tell-thorough, detailed, quietly passionate, and full of revelation."-TED CONOVER, author of Newjack and The Routes of Man

"It's extremely rare when a reporter's passion finds its match in a story. Rarer still when the people in that story courageously join that reporter in the search for what we most need to know about ourselves. When this occurs with a moral journalist who is also a true writer, a human being with a heart capable of holding all of life's damage and joy, the stars have aligned. This is an extraordinary gift of a book, beautiful and devastating-a work of outstanding literary reportage. Read it! It's the best you will find in many many years."-ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC, author of Random Family

" The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks brings to mind the work of Philip K. Dick and Edgar Allan Poe. But this tale is true. Rebecca Skloot explores the racism and greed, the idealism and faith in science that helped to save thousands of lives but nearly destroyed a family. This is an extraordinary book, haunting and beautifully told."-ERIC SCHLOSSER, author of Fast Food Nation

"Skloot's book is wonderful -- deeply felt, gracefully written, sharply reported. It is a story about science but, much more, about life."-SUSAN ORLEAN, author of The Orchid Thief

"This is a science biography like the world has never seen. What if one of the great American women of modern science and medicine--whose contribution underlay historic discoveries in genetics, the treatment and prevention of disease, reproduction, and the unraveling of the human genome--was a self-effacing African-American tobacco farmer from the Deep South? A devoted mother of five who was escorted briskly to the Jim Crow section of Johns Hopkins for her cancer treatments? What if the untold millions of scientists, doctors, and patients enriched and healed by her gift never, to this day, knew her name? What if her contribution was made without her knowledge or permission? Ladies and gentlemen, meet Henrietta Lacks. Chances are, at the level of your DNA, your inoculations, your physical health and microscopic well-being, you've already been introduced."-Melissa Fay Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock and There Is No Me Without You

"Heartbreaking and powerful, unsettling yet compelling, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a richly textured story of the hidden costs of scientific progress. Deftly weaving together history, journalism and biography, Rebecca Skloot?s sensitive account tells of the enduring, deeply personal sacrifice of this African American woman and her family and, at long last, restores a human face to the cell line that propelled 20th century biomedicine. A stunning illustration of how race, gender and disease intersect to produce a unique form of social vulnerability, this is a poignant, necessary and brilliant book."-Alondra Nelson, Columbia University; editor of Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life

"Rebecca Skloot has written a marvelous book so original that it defies easy description. She traces the surreal journey that a tiny patch of cells belonging to Henrietta Lacks's body took to the forefront of science. At the same time, she tells the story of Lacks and her family-wrestling the storms of the late twentieth century in America-with rich detail, wit, and humanity. The more we read, the more we realize that these are not two separate stories, but one tapestry. It's part The Wire, part The Lives of the Cell, and all fascinating." -Carl Zimmer, author of Microcosm

"If virtues could be cultured like cells, Rebecca Skloot's would be a fine place to start¾a rare combination of compassion, courage, wisdom, and intelligence. This book is extraordinary. As a writer and a human being, Skloot stands way, way out there ahead of the pack."-MARY ROACH, author of Stiff and Bonk

" The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks takes the reader on a remarkable journey-compassionate, troubling, funny, smart-and irresistible. Along the way, Rebecca Skloot will change the way you see medical science and lead you to wonder who we should value more-the researcher or the research subject? Ethically fascinating and completely engaging-I couldn't recommend it more."-DEBORAH BLUM, author of The Poisoner's Handbook and The Monkey Wars and the Helen Firstbrook Franklin professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

"This remarkable story of how the cervical cells of the late Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman, enabled subsequent discoveries from the polio vaccine to in vitro fertilization is extraordinary in itself; the added portrayal of Lacks's full life makes the story come alive with her humanity and the palpable relationship between race, science, and exploitation.-PAULA J. GIDDINGS, author of Ida, A Sword Among Lions; Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor, Afro-American Studies, Smith College

"Rebecca Skloot's steadfast commitment to illuminating the life and contribution of Henrietta Lacks, one of the many vulnerable subjects used for scientific advancement, and the subsequent impact on her family is a testament to the power of solid investigative journalism. Her deeply compelling account of one family's long and troubled relationship with America's vast medical-industrial complex is sure to become a cherished classic."-ALLEN M. HORNBLUM, author of Acres of Skin and Sentenced to Science

"Writing with a novelist's artistry, a biologist's expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force." -Booklist (starred review)

"Science journalist Skloot makes a remarkable debut with this multilayered story about 'faith, science, journalism, and grace.'...Recalls Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family...A rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society's most vulnerable people." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Paperback)

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1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "The story of modern medicine and bioethics-and, indeed, race relations-is refracted beautifully, and movingly."-Entertainment WeeklyNOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE * ONE OF THE "MOST INFLUENTIAL" (CNN), "DEFINING" (LITHUB), AND "B