Announcing the Winners of the 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards

Close

Search Results:

  • Cover of The Black Notebooks
    Book

    The Black Notebooks

    Toi Derricotte

    Because the power of her images breeds visions which are neither easy nor inescapable, Toi Derricotte moves us […] The pain does not exceed the power.

  • Cover of Roll, Jordan, Roll
    Book

    Roll, Jordan, Roll

    Eugene D. Genovese

    This is a necessary transcendence of many other historians’ dehumanizing view of both slaves and slaveholders, and to it Genovese brings his intellectual expansiveness and depth of feeling.

  • Portrait of Albert L. Murray
    Author

    Albert L. Murray

    He presents himself as an ardent critic of theories that contend that African Americans are subservient to white social infrastructures. Murray views African American culture as an advantageous extension of the American self.

  • Cover of The Dreyfus Case
    Book

    The Dreyfus Case

    Louis Snyder

    Sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly having communicated French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, Dreyfus was sent to the penal colony at Devil’s Island in French Guiana and placed in solitary confinement.

  • Cover of Justice in South Africa
    Book

    Justice in South Africa

    Albie Sachs

    While executing his first lawyering job as an Advocate at the Cape Town Bar, Sachs came to see laws as tools ‘to oppress people, not to protect people.’

  • Cover of The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright
    Book

    The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright

    Michel Fabre

    A profound and thorough interpretation of Wright’s work. It is at once affective and human, very moving and complete. Michel Fabre understands both the man and the writer.

  • Cover of The Color of Water
    Book

    The Color of Water

    James McBride

    The story of life lived on both sides of the color line, McBride’s memoir gives equal space to the voice of his white mother […] and his own questions about navigating black identity as a mixed-race person.

  • Cover of Doctor and the Aborigines
    Book

    Doctor and the Aborigines

    Charles Duguid

    ‘Doctor and the Aborigines’ tells the story of Dr Duguids’ life, from his birth in Scotland to his eventual arrival in Australia, and then to taking up of the aboriginal cause the 1930’s.

  • Cover of The Autobiography of My Mother
    Book

    The Autobiography of My Mother

    Jamaica Kincaid

    The experience of losing one’s birth mother becomes a metaphor for the detachment from one’s mother country. The novel is a chilling and tight monologue, a haunting expression of the protagonist’s isolation.

  • Cover of Behind Ghetto Walls
    Book

    Behind Ghetto Walls

    Lee Rainwater

    The book pays particular attention to how each new generation of parents expresses the cultural and social structural forces that formed it and continue to constrain its behavior.

  • Cover of Men & Brothers
    Book

    Men & Brothers

    Betty Fladeland

    It is invaluable for its investigation of the see-sawing between the two nations as it grappled with “the peculiar institution,” and how the abolitionist camps of both countries sustained and supported each other as the two governments came to the elimination of the slave trade, colonization of Africa, and emancipation.

  • Cover of The Water Is Wide
    Book

    The Water Is Wide

    Pat Conroy

    Pat Conroy’s extraordinary drama is based on his own experience–the true story of a man who gave a year of his life to an island and the new life its people gave him.

  • Portrait of Dorothy West
    Author

    Dorothy West

    In 1926 West, then living in New York among the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, shared second place honors with Zora Neale Hurston in a national writing competition organized by Opportunity, the magazine of the National Urban League.

  • Cover of Slavery in the Structure of American Politics
  • Cover of The Autobiography of an Unknown South African
    Book

    The Autobiography of an Unknown South African

    Naboth Mokgatle

    Mokgatle’s various organized labor and political activities brought him into headlong contact with state repression. Between 1930 and 1954 he was arrested and imprisoned on countless occasions.

  • Cover of Amazing Grace
    Book

    Amazing Grace

    Jonathan Kozol

    When everything breaks down in a neighborhood, how is a family or children supposed to proper? When the pipes and electricity don’t work, and asthma runs rampant because of an incinerator strategically placed in the poorest and weakest of places, how does the spirit survive?

  • Cover of The Healing of a Nation
    Book

    The Healing of a Nation

    David Loye

    Taking a fresh look at the works of such giants as Pavlov, Freud, Marx, Myrdal, and Kurt Lewin, Loye shows us how their theories and findings can be used to help solve our racial dilemma.

  • Cover of All Souls’ Rising
    Book

    All Souls’ Rising

    Madison Smartt Bell

    Bell dips into the chaos like a colonial Bret Easton Ellis, providing us all the details with an almost deviant relish. It’s only when the noble slave Touissant Louverture takes control of the African mob that a bit of civility returns to the war-torn country.

  • Cover of Outcasts from Evolution
    Book

    Outcasts from Evolution

    John S. Haller Jr.

    John S. Haller, Jr., shows the relationship between scientific “conviction” and public policy. He focuses on the numerous liberally educated American scientists who were caught up in the triumph of evolutionary ideas and who sought to apply those ideas to comparative morality, health, and the physiognomy of nonwhite races.

  • Cover of The Science and Politics of Racial Research
    Book

    The Science and Politics of Racial Research

    William H. Tucker

    Tucker’s accessible book focuses on the intrusion of these “scientists” into public and political life, the methodological problems with their research, and often the politics which underpinned their work.