Prentice Onayemi
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Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, and his family. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Jende is desperate to keep his job and is soon forced to make an impossible choice.
2) The Sellout
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"Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up at the crack in the stucco ceiling that had been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist at Riverside Community College, he spent his childhood as the subject in psychological...
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"Dr. Ben Carson made headlines with his keynote at the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2013. Standing just a few feet from President Obama, the neurosurgeon offered a common sense critique of liberal government, calling for a return to our historic culture of personal responsibility, free markets, and upward mobility. Now, in this sequel to their #1 New York Times bestseller America the Beautiful, Dr. and Mrs. Carson offer a bold plan to stop...
4) Saint X
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"Hailed as a "marvel of a book" and "brilliant and unflinching," Alexis Schaitkin's stunning debut, Saint X, is a haunting portrait of grief, obsession, and the bond between two sisters never truly given the chance to know one another. Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison's body is found in...
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"'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to the...
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In South Africa, the future looks promising. Personal robots are making life easier for the working class. The government is harnessing renewable energy to provide infrastructure for the poor. And in the bustling coastal town of Port Elizabeth, the economy is booming thanks to the genetic engineering industry which has found a welcome home there. Yesthe days to come are looking very good for South Africans. That is, if they can survive the present...
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"In the black-owned-and-operated Kirkwood Hospital, Joseph 'Ziggy' Johnson reflects on his life. From the Great Depression through the post-World War II years, Ziggy had been the pulse of Detroit's famous Black Bottom. A celebrated gossip columnist for the city's African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, he was also the emcee of one of the hottest night clubs, where he rubbed elbows with the legendary black artists of the era. In his hospital...
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Winner of the Gold Nautilus Award for Fiction A Lambda Literary Award Finalist A Barbara Gittings Literature Award Finalist One of Bustle's and Paste's Most Anticipated Fiction Books of the Year
"Speak No Evil is the rarest of novels: the one you start out just to read, then end up sinking so deeply into it, seeing yourself so clearly in it, that the novel starts reading you." - Marlon James, Booker Award-winning author of A Brief History...
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America in the King years volume 2
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In Pillar of Fire, the second volume of his America in the King Years trilogy, Taylor Branch portrays the civil rights era at its zenith. The first volume, Parting the Waters, won the Pulitzer Prize for History. It is a monumental chronicle of a movement that stirred from Southern black churches to challenge the national conscience during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. In this masterly continuation of the narrative, Branch recounts the climactic...
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As a survivor of the devastating civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Joseph Kaifala recounts the harrowing details of an early life punctuated by unimaginable violence and his journey to survival that eventually led him to the United States. Told with humility and grace, Adamalui is the true story of one man's unshakable faith, thirst for knowledge, and indomitable will. Kaifala's experiences as a child prisoner and refugee are told through a...
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"Winner of the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction, Oregon Book Awards" "Shortlisted for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa Society" "Shortlisted for the MAAH Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History" "One of Whoopi Goldberg's Favorite Things, ABC The View" "New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice" "Chicago Tribune writer John Warner's Book That Will Help You Better Understand the Messed-Up Nature of the World"...
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"A stunning debut novel, from Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Tope Folarin about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uncomfortable assimilation to American life. Living in small-town Utah has always been an uneasy fit for Tunde Akinola's family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he can't escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black...
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A haunting and powerfully moving book that gives voice to the poorest among us and lays bare the cruelty of a penal system that too often defines their lives.
Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist Chris Hedges has taught courses in drama, literature, philosophy, and history since 2013 in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University at East Jersey State Prison and other New Jersey prisons. In his first class at East Jersey State Prison,...
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On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto-a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original interpretation, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot understand the entanglements of race, poverty, and place...
17) A Father First
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Dwyane Wade, the eight-time All-Star for the Miami Heat, has miraculously defied the odds throughout his career and his life. In 2006, in just his third season in the NBA, Dwyane was named the Finals' MVP, after leading the Miami Heat to the Championship title, basketball's ultimate prize. Two years later, after possible career-ending injuries, he again rose from the ashes of doubt to help win a gold medal for the United States at the 2008 Beijing...
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On the eve of Edafe Okporo's twenty-sixth birthday, he was awoken to a violent mob outside his window in Abuja, Nigeria. The mob threatened his life after discovering the secret Edafe had been hiding for years - that he is a gay man. Left with no other choice, he purchased a one-way plane ticket to New York City and fled for his life. Though America had always been painted to him as a land of freedom and opportunity, it was anything but when he arrived...
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The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians...
20) Wirewalker
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Precious meets Laurie Halse Anderson in this beautifully written literary debut about inner-city horrors and one boy's journey to overcome them.Fourteen-year-old Clarence is small and slight for his age. His mother--who, like Clarence, was black--was killed before his eyes by a stray bullet four years ago. His white father has since abdicated all pretense of parenthood and allowed his drinking buddy Johnnyprice to press Clarence into service as a...