New African American Books: Adult Nonfiction
March 10, 2010
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
by Zadie Smith
Thorndike Press
Available 04/02/10 in Hardcover
Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.
Split into four sections-”Reading,” “Being,” “Seeing,” and “Feeling”-Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith’s unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays-some published here for the first time-on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani.
In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers-E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others-have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences-in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond-that have nourished Smith’s rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected.
Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.
March 10, 2010
Sterling
Available 12/01/09 in Hardcover
A celebration of freedom and the man who fought so valiantly for it: NELSON MANDELA
Almost 20 years ago, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela—brutally imprisoned in South Africa for his struggle against apartheid—was finally released. This beautiful illustrated volume commemorates that event and Mandela’s inspiring life and work.
Created by renowned author David Elliot Cohen—who has worked with many of the top photojournalists who chronicled the “apartheid battles”—Nelson Mandela contains many images that have rarely, if ever, been seen, as well as the more iconic photos that have lingered in people’s minds. Like Obama: The Historic Front Pages, this will be rich in illustrations and elegantly designed, and will contain brief essays and key Mandela speeches rather than a running text.
March 10, 2010
Black Is the New Green: Marketing to Affluent African Americans
Leonard E. Burnett Jr. and Andrea Hoffman
Palgrave Macmillan
Available 03/16/10 in Hardcover
The general market for luxury goods has become stagnant. Given the new economic reality of the early 21st Century—not to mention the all-important new demographics of the new century—it’s bad business to continue to rely on luxury’s traditional customer base to support sales, or on tired marketing strategies and tactics. In Black is the New Green authors Burnett and Hoffman show readers how to follow in the footsteps laid down by brands such as Gucci, HSBC, Sony Electronics, and Aston Martin, amongst others, to become successful in a segment corporations can’t afford to overlook if growth is the objective.
The total number of affluent ethnic households in the United States in now estimated at over 1.3 million, the buying power of affluent African Americans (referred to as AAA’s in this book) is currently $87.3 billion. This massive buying power is expected to reach more than $1.1 trillion by 2012—just three short years for a cumulative growth of 28.4 percent. It would be foolish in the extreme not to tap into this rich buying segment, yet that is exactly what the marketing arms of companies do all too frequently. Sometimes this is because the executives in a particular marketing department are unaware of the potential that exists within this segment, sometimes it’s because they are baffled about how to reach out to this segment and sometimes it’s because they think they lack the money or resources to make a credible effort at adding a whole new segment. And sometimes, unfortunately, it’s because they have reached out in the past but their efforts were unappealing to the AAA audience. Black is the New Green will show you how to attract this lucrative market and create brand loyalty and product bonding among affluent African Americans in an affordable and measurable way.
Up until now, the affluent African American market has been underappreciated and overlooked. But with a sitting African American president—the time is now to tap into this market and to embrace a constituency that will have a lasting effect on your bottom line.
February 27, 2010
W. W. Norton & Company
Available 11/04/09 in Hardcover
A stunning, visual biography of Michelle Obama that finally puts her phenomenal fame into a cultural and historical context we can all understand. There has never been a First Lady like her before. While there have been a slew of Obama celebrity books, none contain the message of Deborah Willis and Emily Bernard’s eye-opening book. With nearly 200 compelling photographs, these two noted scholars capture Michelle Obama’s dramatic transformation from working mother to First Lady, from her first tentative steps on the campaign trail to her spontaneous hug of the Queen, to her fairy-tale-like “date night” on Broadway. Not since Jacqueline Kennedy has there been a First Lady who has so enchanted America, but in her down-to-earth dealings with all Americans — schoolchildren, military families, and home gardeners alike — and in her diverse fashion taste, from J. Crew to Jason Wu, Michelle Obama is inexplicably all pearls, all business, all mother. The authors show how Michelle Obama represents the culmination of America’s evolving views on women, race, motherhood, and beauty. Much more than a mere catalog of style, Michelle Obama is a remarkable pictorial story of one woman’s hold on our imagination. 150 full-color photographs.
February 27, 2010
A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison
by R. Dwayne Betts
Avery Trade
Available 05/04/10 in Paperback
A unique prison narrative that testifies to the power of books to transform a young man’s life
At the age of sixteen, R. Dwayne Betts-a good student from a lower- middle-class family-carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. In Virginia, carjacking is a “certifiable” offense, meaning that Betts would be treated as an adult under state law. A bright young kid, he served his nine-year sentence as part of the adult population in some of the worst prisons in the state. A Question of Freedom chronicles Betts’s years in prison, reflecting back on his crime and looking ahead to how his experiences and the books he discovered while incarcerated would define him. Utterly alone, Betts confronts profound questions about violence, freedom, crime, race, and the justice system. Confined by cinder-block walls and barbed wire, he discovers the power of language through books, poetry, and his own pen. Above all, A Question of Freedom is about a quest for identity-one that guarantees Betts’s survival in a hostile environment and that incorporates an understanding of how his own past led to the moment of his crime.
February 27, 2010
Knopf
Available 04/06/10 in Hardcover
No story has been more central to America’s history this century than the rise of Barack Obama, and until now, no journalist or historian has written a book that fully investigates the circumstances and experiences of Obama’s life or explores the ambition behind his rise. Those familiar with Obama’s own best-selling memoir or his campaign speeches know the touchstones and details that he chooses to emphasize, but now — from a writer whose gift for illuminating the historical significance of unfolding events is without peer — we have a portrait, at once masterly and fresh, nuanced and unexpected, of a young man in search of himself, and of a rising politician determined to become the first African-American president.
The Bridge offers the most complete account yet of Obama’s tragic father, a brilliant economist who abandoned his family and ended his life as a beaten man; of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who had a child as a teenager and then built her career as an anthropologist living and studying in Indonesia; and of the succession of elite institutions that first exposed Obama to the social tensions and intellectual currents that would force him to imagine and fashion an identity for himself. Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, David Remnick allows us to see how a rootless, unaccomplished, and confused young man created himself first as a community organizer in Chicago, an experience that would not only shape his urge to work in politics but give him a home and a community, and that would propel him to Harvard Law School, where his sense of a greater mission emerged.
Deftly setting Obama’s political career against the galvanizing intersection of race and politics in Chicago’s history, Remnick shows us how that city’s complex racial legacy would make Obama’s forays into politics a source of controversy and bare-knuckle tactics: his clashes with older black politicians in the Illinois State Senate, his disastrous decision to challenge the former Black Panther Bobby Rush for Congress in 2000, the sex scandals that would decimate his more experienced opponents in the 2004 Senate race, and the story — from both sides — of his confrontation with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. By looking at Obama’s political rise through the prism of our racial history, Remnick gives us the conflicting agendas of black politicians: the dilemmas of men like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Joseph Lowery, heroes of the civil rights movement, who are forced to reassess old loyalties and understand the priorities of a new generation of African-American leaders.
The Bridge revisits the American drama of race, from slavery to civil rights, and makes clear how Obama’s quest is not just his own but is emblematic of a nation where destiny is defined by individuals keen to imagine a future that is different from the reality of their current lives.
February 21, 2010
Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II (Oral History Series)
by J. Todd Moye
Oxford University Press, USA
Available 04/12/10 in Hardcover
As the country’s first African American military pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen fought in World War II on two fronts: against the Axis powers in the skies over Europe and against Jim Crow racism and segregation at home. Although the pilots flew more than 15,000 sorties and destroyed more than 200 German aircraft, their most far-reaching achievement defies quantification: delivering a powerful blow to racial inequality and discrimination in American life.
In this inspiring account of the Tuskegee Airmen, historian J. Todd Moye captures the challenges and triumphs of these brave pilots in their own words, drawing on more than 800 interviews recorded for the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project. Denied the right to fully participate in the U.S. war effort alongside whites at the beginning of World War II, African Americans–spurred on by black newspapers and civil rights organizations such as the NAACP–compelled the prestigious Army Air Corps to open its training programs to black pilots, despite the objections of its top generals. Thousands of young men came from every part of the country to Tuskegee, Alabama, in the heart of the segregated South, to enter the program, which expanded in 1943 to train multi-engine bomber pilots in addition to fighter pilots. By the end of the war, Tuskegee Airfield had become a small city populated by black mechanics, parachute packers, doctors, and nurses. Together, they helped prove that racial segregation of the fighting forces was so inefficient as to be counterproductive to the nation’s defense.
Freedom Flyers brings to life the legacy of a determined, visionary cadre of African American airmen who proved their capabilities and patriotism beyond question, transformed the armed forces–formerly the nation’s most racially polarized institution–and jump-started the modern struggle for racial equality.
February 21, 2010
Foxy: My Life in Three Acts
by Pam Grier, with Andrea Cagan
Springboard Press
Available 04/28/10 in Hardcover
Beautiful, bold, and bad, Pam Grier burst onto the movie scene in the 1970s, setting the screen on fire and forever changing the country’s view of African American actresses. With a killer attitude and body to match, Grier became the ultimate fantasy of men everywhere. But she quickly proved that she was more than just a desirable film goddess. She had the brains, courage, and tenacity to sustain a career that would span more than 30 years. In FOXY, she chronicles the good, bad, and steamy highlights in her life and career. From her early beginnings as a star in Foxy Brown to her Golden-Globe nominated role in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Grier reveals her hard-won battles against racism and sexism, her victories in Hollywood, and her relationships with Richard Pryor and Kareem Abdul Jabar. Here, we see Pam in all of her incredible roles-from army brat and movie star to cancer survivor and dedicated activist. Revealing, thoroughly candid, and audacious, this is a no-holds-barred look at one of our most enduring screen idols.
February 21, 2010
Pantheon
Available 05/11/10 in Hardcover
The first definitive biography of Henry Aaron — baseball’s great home-run champion and one of its most enduring legends.
As the steroid controversy has increasingly tarnished baseball’s image, Hank Aaron’s achievements have come to seem all the more remarkable: the first player to pass Babe Ruth in home runs, Aaron held that record for thirty-three years while shattering other records (RBIs, total bases, extra-base hits) and setting new ones (hitting at least thirty home runs per season fifteen times). But his achievements run much deeper than his stats. Chronicling the social upheavals of the years during which Aaron played (1954 to 1976), Howard Bryant shows us how the dignity and determination with which he stood against racism — on and off the field, and as one of the first blacks in baseball’s upper management — helped transform the role and significance of the professional black athlete and turn Aaron into an national icon.
Eloquently written, detailed, and penetrating, this is a revelatory portrait of both the great ballplayer and the complicated private man.
February 21, 2010
Cookin’ with Coolio: 5 Star Meals at a 1 Star Price
by Coolio
Atria
Available 11/17/09 in Paperback
THERE’S ONLY ONE THING THAT COOLIO’S BEEN DOING LONGER THAN RAPPING: COOKING
Coolio started making thirty-minute meals when he was ten years old and has since developed a whole new cuisine: Ghetto Gourmet. His recipes are built around solid comfort foods with a healthy twist that don’t break the bank. Start your Ghetto Gourmet adventure with some “Soul Rolls,” follow-up with “Finger-Lickin’, Rib-Stickin’, Fall-Off-the-Bone-and-into-Your-Mouth Chicken,” and finish off with “Banana Ba-ba-ba-bread” sweetened with golden honey. Chapters such as “How to Become a Kitchen Pimp,” “Chillin’ and Grillin’,” and “Pasta Like a Rasta” will guide you through creating 5 star meals at a 1 star price. You can’t find fusions like Blasian (black Asian) or Ghettalian (ghetto Italian) in restaurants, but you can have them cooking away in your kitchen faster and easier than ordering takeout. As Coolio says, “All you need is a little bit of food, and a little bit of know-how.”
