Nettie Parker’s Backyard is the story of a mystical, wonderful African-American Gullah woman and the supernatural signs she receives, which guide her to care for eight Jewish child refugees in WWII London. The special bonds they form are so strong, nothing can break them: neither time nor distance, proving love is the greatest force of all in a surprise twist ending. Important themes of anti-bullying and tolerance toward all, regardless of race, religion or physical challenges are woven into this historical-fiction mystery, and contains something to which every child, ages 9-13, can relate.

Bullying has become a global problem for today’s youth, and hate-crime rates continue to skyrocket. The characters in my book have little in common: they are from various countries, cultures and religious backgrounds…yet it all works! My book inspires the reader to see that what matters is the “core” of each person, and that acceptance of others and their differences truly means enriching themselves.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali captured the world’s attention with Infidel, her compelling coming-of-age memoir, which spent thirty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now, in Nomad, Hirsi Ali tells of coming to America to build a new life, an ocean away from the death threats made to her by European Islamists, the strife she witnessed, and the inner conflict she suffered. It is the story of her physical journey to freedom and, more crucially, her emotional journey to freedom–her transition from a tribal mind-set that restricts women’s every thought and action to a life as a free and equal citizen in an open society. Through stories of the challenges she has faced, she shows the difficulty of reconciling the contradictions of Islam with Western values.

In these pages Hirsi Ali recounts the many turns her life took after she broke with her family, and how she struggled to throw off restrictive superstitions and misconceptions that initially hobbled her ability to assimilate into Western society. She writes movingly of her reconciliation, on his deathbed, with her devout father, who had disowned her when she renounced Islam after 9/11, as well as with her mother and cousins in Somalia and in Europe.

Nomad is a portrait of a family torn apart by the clash of civilizations. But it is also a touching, uplifting, and often funny account of one woman’s discovery of today’s America. While Hirsi Ali loves much of what she encounters, she fears we are repeating the European mistake of underestimating radical Islam. She calls on key institutions of the West–including universities, the feminist movement, and the Christian churches–to enact specific, innovative remedies that would help other Muslim immigrants to overcome the challenges she has experienced and to resist the fatal allure of fundamentalism and terrorism.

This is Hirsi Ali’s intellectual coming-of-age, a memoir that conveys her philosophy as well as her experiences, and that also conveys an urgent message and mission–to inform the West of the extent of the threat from Islam, both from outside and from within our open societies. A celebration of free speech and democracy, Nomad is an important contribution to the history of ideas, but above all a rousing call to action.

Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Free Press
Available February 8, 2011 in Paperback

One hundred sermons that display the victorious, although sometimes painful, historical and spiritual pilgrimage of black people in America. A groundbreaking anthology, Preaching with Sacred Fire is a unique and powerful work. It captures the stunning diversity of the cultural and historical legacy of African American preaching more than three hundred years in the making. Each sermon, as editors Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas reveal, is a work of art and a lesson in unmatched rhetoric. The journey through this anthology — which includes selections from Jarena Lee, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Gardner C. Taylor, Vashti McKenzie, and many others — offers a rare view of the unheralded role of the African American preacher in American history.

The collection provides new insights into the underpinnings of the black fight for emancipation and the rise and growth of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Sermons from the first decade of the twenty-first century point toward the future of African American preaching. Biographies of the preachers put their work in the cultural and homiletic context of their periods.

The preachers of these sermons are men and women from a range of faiths, ancestries, and educational backgrounds. They draw on a vast and luminous landscape of poetic language, using metaphor, rhythm, and imagery to communicate with their congregations. What they all have in common is hope, resilience, and sacred fire. “Even during the most difficult and oppressive times,” Simmons and Thomas write in the preface, “the delivery, creativity, charisma, expressivity, fervor, forcefulness, passion, persuasiveness, poise, power, rhetoric, spirit, style, and vision of black preaching gave and gives hope to a community under siege.”

This magnificent work beautifully renders the complexity, spiritual richness, and strength of African American life.

Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present
Martha Simmons (Editor), Frank A. Thomas (Editor), Gardner C. Taylor (Foreword)

W. W. Norton & Company
Available August 16, 2010 in Hardcover