Social Science : African-American Studies

Barely able to make it into the heavyweight division and almost always the smaller fighter in the ring, Holyfield spent his professional career proving the naysayers wrong. Along the way he provided some of the twentieth century's most thrilling sports moments, not all of them on purpose. In Becoming Holyfield, he gives us the exciting inside story of defeating Mike Tyson, the self-proclaimed "Baddest Man on Earth," and then getting a piece of his ear bitten off in the rematch. We learn how it felt to become the undisputed champion of the world by knocking out the man who knocked out Tyson, and we find out what it was really like to be in the middle of a title fight and see a motorized parachute fly right into the ring. more...

Price: $17.99

A collection of true love stories from the American slavery period relates the experiences of slave, free, and black-and-white couples who risked their lives in order to be together, from a Georgia couple who fled bounty hunters for England to a Missouri slave who escaped to Canada to be with his white Mormon love. 25,000 first printing. more...

Price: $11.99

Launching Our Black Children for Success is a groundbreaking book that goes beyond the typical "how to get your kid into the best school or college" advice. This extraordinary book takes black parents step-by-step through the stages of child development so they can build a solid foundation for success in their children. It shows how to best instill pride, self-discipline, social skills, a work ethic, and a way to deal with the inevitable racism and prejudice their children will face. Authors Joyce Ladner and Theresa Foy DiGeronimo also offer a practical guide for overcoming the many injustices and obstacles African American families face and show how to shepherd their kids through the process that is required to help children keep their "eyes on the prize." Launching Our Black Children for Success helps parents to provide the strength and the strategies their children need to seek out whatever career they dream of and deserve. more...

Price: $17.95

Despite the plethora of writing about jazz, little attention has been paid to what musicians themselves wrote and said about their practice. An implicit division of labor has emerged where, for the most part, black artists invent and play music while white writers provide the commentary. more...

Price: $15.95

In Shelby Steele's beautifully wrought and thought provoking new book, A Bound Man, the award-winning and bestselling author of The Content of Our Character attests that Senator Barack Obama's groundbreaking quest for the highest office in the land is fast becoming a galvanizing occasion beyond mere presidential politics, one that is forcing a national dialogue on the current state of race relations in America. Says Steele, poverty and inequality usually are the focus of such dialogues, but Obama's bid for so high an office pushes the conversation to a more abstract level where race is a politics of guilt and innocence generated by our painful racial history -- a kind of morality play between (and within) the races in which innocence is power and guilt is impotence. Steele writes of how Obama is caught between the two classic postures that blacks have always used to make their way in the white American mainstream: bargaining and challenging. Bargainers strike a "bargain" with white America in which they say, I will not rub America's ugly history of racism in your face if you will not hold my race against me. Challengers do the opposite of bargainers. They charge whites with inherent racism and then demand that they prove themselves innocent by supporting black-friendly policies like affirmative action and diversity. Steele maintains that Senator Obama is too constrained by these elaborate politics to find his own true political voice. Obama has the temperament, intelligence, and background -- an interracial family, a sterling education -- to guide America beyond the exhausted racial politics that now prevail. And yet he is a Promethean figure, a bound man. Says Steele, Americans are constrained by a racial correctness so totalitarian that we are afraid even to privately ask ourselves what we think about racial matters. Like Obama, most of us find it easier to program ourselves for correctness rather than risk knowing and expressing what we more...

Price: $17.99