Social Science : African-American Studies

Gates, the eminent Harvard scholar and author, traveled around the US to find out why and how black America has split into what he sees as two distinct communities: one privileged and one disenfranchised. The book, the companion to a PBS television series of the same name, comprises about 40 essays focusing on individuals (both prominent and obscure) who inhabit four spheres: the "ebony towers" of academia, government, and business; the American South, whose black population increased by almost 3.6 million in the 1990s; black Hollywood; and Chicago's South Side, where a parallel world of extreme black poverty persists. Gates' interviewees talk about race, class, and what it means to be African-American in the 21st century. more...

Price: $11.99

A profoundly courageous and insightful memoir, An American Story documents the events that have shaped journalist Debra Dickerson's conscience. The daughter of former sharecroppers, Dickerson never imagined she would emerge from her squalid St. more...

Price: $13.95

In At Home in Diaspora, Wendy W. Walters investigates the work of Chester Himes, Michelle Cliff, and other twentieth-century black international writers who have lived in and written from countries they do not call home. Walters suggests that in the absence of a recoverable land of origin, the idea of diaspora comes to represent a home that is not singular or exclusionary. more...

Price: $60.00

"August Wilson and Black Aesthetics" offers new essays that address issues raised in Wilson's "The Ground on Which I Stand" speech. Essays and interviews range from examinations of the presence of Wilson's politics in his plays to the limitations of these politics on contemporary interpretations of Black aesthetics. Also included is Sybil Roberts' "A Liberating Prayer: A Lovesong for Mumia," that, for two seasons, has played to sold out houses, but that until now has not been published. more...

Price: $65.00

To The Washington Post, he's "The Last Political Showman of the 20th Century.". Bill Clinton has called him "the real Slick Willie.". Ronald Reagan's secretary of state George Shultz called this famously liberal politician "a man of his word" and endorsed his successful candidacy for mayor of San Francisco. Indeed Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both called upon him for advice and help. He is Willie L. Brown, Jr., and he knows how to get things done in politics, how to work both sides of the aisle to get results. Compared to him, Machiavelli looks meek. And drab. Basic Brown is a compendium of insights and stories on the real forces governing power in American political life that will leave you looking at politics anew. It is also the inspiring and funny story of the rise of a gawky teenager in mail-order shoes and trousers who rose to entertain royalty and schoolchildren, superstars and supersize egos, the saintly and the scholarly, while working to transform and open American politics. If you ever wanted to learn how to be slick, a shark, a do-gooder, and a man of your word, Willie L. Brown, Jr., is the storyteller for you. more...

Price: $17.99