"Foreword by Earvin "Magic" Johnson"Absolutely one of the best players ever to play the game." --Bill Walton A three-time Olympic gold medalist, three-time MVP of the WNBA, and the first woman ever to dunk in a professional basketball game, Lisa Leslie is considered one of the greatest players in the history of women's basketball. But before the superstar was the child growing up too fast in South Central Los Angeles. Over six feet tall in the sixth...

Sometimes things seem to be moving along fine, and yet something just seems to be "off." There are times when things seem to be within one's grasp, and yet just beyond our reach. To some, it is just a fact of life. Others wonder why.My Eventful Life presents the autobiography of Jimmie L. Baker, a veteran, courier, husband, and father. It narrates the story of his life, filled with seeming firsts in his community. He seemed to have a golden touch,...

In 1936, Lillian Rosengarten and her family fled Nazi Germany for New York. But even there, the legacy of the Nazis' brutality continued to cast a shadow over her family for many decades. In Survival and Conscience, Rosengarten describes how she faced those challenges within her own life while gaining empathy for the struggles of others, realizing that all forms of extreme nationalism and hatred must be vigorously resisted. Like many other refugees...

"From the time of his famous Atlanta address in 1895 until his death in 1915, Booker T. Washington was the preeminent African-American educator and race leader. But to historians and biographers of the last hundred years, Washington has often been described as an enigma, a man who rose to prominence because he offered a compromise with the white South: he was willing to trade civil rights for economic and educational advancement. Thus one historian...

In her book, Alexandra Robbins explores the ways group identity theories play out among cliques--and the students they exclude. She reveals the new labels students stick onto each other today, the long-term effects of this marginalization, and the reasons students falling under these categories are often shunned.

"We all came to the powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling threads of our lives got pulled into a braid--tied to the back of everything we'd been doing all along to get us here. There will be death and playing dead, there will be screams and unbearable silences, forever-silences, and a kind of time-travel, at the moment the gunshots start, when we look around and see ourselves as we are, in our regalia, and something in our blood will recoil...

What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we?re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join?and more importantly, stay in?extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me?

Black in China tells the dynamic story of Aaron A. Vessup, a Black American teacher who, after decades of living in the shadow of America's racism, makes the radical decision to travel 8,000 miles to find a new future as an educator in China. Aaron's story spans the gulf between the crooked streets of South-Central LA and the crowded lanes of modern Beijing, providing a rich and intimate view of China today through the eyes of a Black man. Aaron grapples...

"Lorraine Hansberry tells the fascinating story of the brave and talented woman who, almost single-handedly, overcame the racial obstacles that made for a segregated American theatre in the years following World War II. Hansberry was just twenty-nine years old when her play A Raisin in the Sun opened in 1959--an era where her very existence as a black, female writer was considered unusual. The play was an overnight sensation, earning its author the...

"In her latest book of supernatural, true-life mystery, Linda Alice Dewey is contacted by a ghost named Jacobs. Jacobs is a runaway slave who was brutally murdered during the Civil War. Using Jacobs's own words, Dewey tells Jacobs's gripping story of being a slave, a fugitive, a vagrant in nineteenth-century America--and his "life" as The Ghost Who Would Not Die. After Jacobs is murdered, his ghost congregates with other ghosts, plays tricks on people,...