Search Results: AC

Raised in rural New Hampshire, Banks initially planned to follow his father into the plumbing business; where he grew up, he told an interviewer, ‘the idea of being a writer was like the idea of being a butterfly.’

The narrative improvises upon the oral tradition of talk-story, a form of storytelling that encouraged Hong Kingston’s aspirations to become a strong, self-articulate woman.

I learned that photography would enable me to show what was right and wrong about America, the world and life.

Persuaded that the enormity of a bygone injustice has been only partially perceived, I have taken upon myself the task of piecing together what might be called the ‘forgotten’ or ignored parts of the tapestry of those years.

Richard Kluger provides the fullest possible view of the human and legal drama in the years before 1954, the cumulative assaults on the white power structure that defended segregation, and the step-by-step establishment of a team of inspired black lawyers that could successfully challenge the law.

Paramount in his analysis is the importance of Islam, the principal Middle Eastern religion, and how it has helped mould the character and proclivities of the ‘elusive, self-contradictory Arab mentality.’

Dawidowicz allows the coolly accumulated weight of detail—the growing force of the Nazi’s anti-Semitic juggernaut, the evolution of the camps as places of scientific murder, the efforts by the victims to hold onto fragments of normal life—to create its emotional and intellectual impact.

The book is encyclopedic in scope and is sure to provide the definitive account, tracing the development of Aryan mythology in European history.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.