New Releases
Come On People
On the Path from Victims to Victors
By Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint
Hardcover | Thomas Nelson | Non-fiction | Oct 2007 ISBN: 9781595550927 | pp. 288 -$25.99
Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint have a powerful message for families and communities as they lay out their visions for strengthening America, or for that matter the world. They address the crises of people who are stuck because of feelings of low self-esteem, abandonment, anger, fearfulness, sadness, and feelings of being used, undefended and unprotected. These feelings often impede their ability to move forward. The authors aim to help empower people make the daunting transition from victims to victors. Come On, People! is always engaging, and loaded with heart-piercing stories of the problems facing many communities.
New England White
A novel by Stephen L. Carter
Hardcover | Knopf | Fiction; Fiction - Thrillers | June 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-41362-9 | $26.95
When The Emperor of Ocean Park was published, Time Out declared: “Carter does for members of the contemporary black upper class what Henry James did for Washington Square society, taking us into their drawing rooms and laying their motives bare.” Now, with the same powers of observation, and the same richness of plot and character, Stephen L. Carter returns to the New England university town of Elm Harbor, where a murder begins to crack the veneer that has hidden the racial complications of the town’s past, the secrets of a prominent family, and the most hidden bastions of African-American political influence.
Brother, I'm Dying
A memoir by Edwidge Danticat
978-1-4000-4115-2 | September 2007 ISBN: 1-4000-4115-5 |
From the best-selling author of The Dew Breaker, a major work of nonfiction: a powerfully moving family story that centers around the men closest to her heart—her father, Mira, and his older brother, Joseph.
From the age of four, Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph, a charismatic pastor, as her “second father,” when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for a better life in America. Listening to his sermons, sharing coconut-flavored ices on their walks through town, roaming through the house that held together many members of a colorful extended family, Edwidge grew profoundly attached to Joseph. He was the man who “knew all the verses for love.”
… Told with tremendous feeling, this is a true-life epic on an intimate scale: a deeply affecting story of home and family—of two men’s lives and deaths, and of a daughter’s great love for them both.
On the Courthouse Lawn
Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century
By Sherrilyn A. Ifill
Hardcover | Beacon | Non-fiction | Spring 2007 | ISBN: 978-080700987-1 | pp. 224 | $25.95
Concrete ways for communities with histories of racial violence to move toward reconciliation Nearly 5,000 black Americans were
lynched between 1890 and 1960, and as Sherrilyn Ifill argues, the effects of
this racial trauma continue to resound. While the lynchings were devastating,
the little-known contemporary consequences, such as the marginalization of
political and economic development for blacks, are equally pernicious. Ifill
traces the lingering effects of two lynchings in Maryland to illustrate how
ubiquitous this history is, and she issues a clarion call for the many
American communities with histories of racial violence to be proactive in
facing this legacy.
Inspired by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and techniques
of restorative justice, Ifill provides concrete ideas for communities,
including placing gravestones on the unmarked burial sites of lynching
victims, issuing public apologies, establishing mandatory school programs on
the local history of lynching, financially compensating those whose family
homes or businesses were destroyed in the aftermath of lynching, and creating
commemorative public spaces. A landmark book, On the Courthouse Lawn is a
much-needed roadmap to help communities finally confront lynching's long
shadow by embracing pragmatic reconciliation and reparation
efforts.