Risultati letto da "Ron Butler" in Tutte le categorie

After the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by a white police officer, Chicagoans demanded change. Can a new state’s attorney, the first black woman to hold the position, bring real reform to a broken system? With a brick on her desk from the Cabrini-Green housing project where she spent her childhood, Kim Foxx must adapt her hard-won ideals to the realities of criminal justice in Chicago. In this intimate narrative by award-winning author Steve Bogira, Foxx reveals: “My mother taught me how to be a hustler. Hustle in the sense of work hard, grind - find a way out of no way.”

When a middle-class kid from the suburbs was caught using Facebook to distribute firearms bought legally at Indiana gun shows to notorious gangsters across the border - was he a kingpin or a scapegoat? David Lewisbey received perhaps the harshest sentence ever in a gun-trafficking trial. A college student from the suburban outskirts of Chicago, he allegedly embodied the enterprising swagger of his favorite rap lyrics, moving weapons for stacks of cash. John H. Richardson tours Chicago’s gun-soaked South Side with Lewisbey’s clientele and meets with the “Big Man” himself to unpack the truth.

"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.

Come sit on the veranda and pour yourself a glass of sweet tea, fortified with a slug of bourbon. Put your feet up and enjoy these stories set in Atlanta, a city sewn from the ashes, where everything that grows is both fertilized and corrupted by the past.

During the 19th century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War.

The seminal rap group A Tribe Called Quest brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces. This narrative follows Tribe from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Throughout the narrative, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself.

RAN AWAY. So began a score of advertisements every week in the New Orleans newspapers, advertising for slaves who’d fled their masters. But the Turk, Hüseyin Pasha, posted no such advertisement when his two lovely concubines disappeared. And when a witness proclaimed he’d seen the “devilish infidel” hurl their dead bodies out of a window, everyone was willing to believe him the murderer. Only Benjamin January, who knows the Turk of old, is willing to seek for the true culprit, endangering his own life in the process.

Abishag Shaw is seeking vengeance for his brother’s murder - and Benjamin January is seeking money after his bank crashes. Far beyond the frontier, in the depths of the Rocky Mountains, both men are to be found at the great Rendezvous of the Mountain Men, a month-long orgy of cheap booze, shooting matches, tall tales, and cutthroat trading. But at the rendezvous, the discovery of a corpse opens the door to hints of a greater plot - of madness and wholesale murder.

New Orleans, 1836. When free Black musician and surgeon Benjamin January attends the funeral of a friend, an accident tips the dead man out of his coffin - only to reveal an unexpected inhabitant. Just one person recognizes the corpse of the White man: Hannibal Sefton, fiddle-player and one of January’s closest friends. But he seems unwilling to talk about his connection to the dead man....

Nineteenth-century New Orleans is a blazing hotbed of scorching politics and personal vendettas. And it’s into this fire that Benjamin January falls when he is hired to follow Oliver Weems, a bank official who has absconded with $100,000 in gold and securities. But it’s more than just a job for January. The missing money is vital to the survival of the school for freed slaves that he and his wife, Rose, have founded.

Mexico City in the autumn of 1835 is a lawless place, teeming with bandits and beggars. But an urgent letter from a desperate friend draws Benjamin January and his new bride, Rose, from New Orleans to this newly free province. Here they pray they’ll find Hannibal Sefton alive - and not hanging from the end of a rope.

It’s 1835, and the relentless glare of the late July sun has slowed New Orleans to a standstill. When Hesione LeGros - once a corsair’s jeweled mistress, now a raddled hag - is found slashed to death in a shanty on the fringe of New Orleans’ most lawless quarter, there are few to care. But one of them is Benjamin January, musician and teacher. He well recalls her blazing ebony beauty when she appeared, exquisitely gowned and handy with a stiletto, at a demimonde banquet years ago.

In February 1835, the cold New Orleans streets are alight with masked Mardi Gras revelers as the American Theater’s impresario, Lorenzo Belaggio, brings a magnificent yet controversial operatic version of Othello to town. But it’s pitch-black in the alley where free man of color Benjamin January hears a slurred whisper, spies the flash of a knife, and is himself wounded as he rescues Belaggio from a vicious attack. Could competition for audiences - or for Belagio’s affections - provoke such violent skulduggery?

When slave owner Simon Fourchet asks Benjamin January to investigate sabotage, arson, and murder on his plantation, January is reluctant to do any favors for the savage man who owned him until he was seven. But he knows too well that plantation justice means that if the true culprit is not found, every slave on Mon Triomphe will suffer. Abandoning his Parisian French for the African patois of a field hand, cutting cane until his bones ache and his musician’s hands bleed, Benjamin must use all his intelligence and cunning to find the killer - or find himself sold down the river.

It is St. John’s Eve in the summer of 1834 when Benjamin January - Creole physician and music teacher - is shattered by the news that his sister has been arrested for murder. The Guards have only a shadow of a case against her. But Olympe - mystical and rebellious - is a woman of color, whose chance for justice is slim. As Benjamin probes the allegation, he is targeted by a new threat: graveyard dust sprinkled at his door, whispering of a voodoo death curse. Now, to save Olympe’s life - and his own - Benjamin knows he must glean information wherever he can find it.

The summer of 1833 has been one of brazen heat and brutal pestilence, as the city is stalked by Bronze John - the popular name for the deadly yellow fever epidemic that tests the healing skills of doctor and voodoo alike. Even as Benjamin January tends the dying at Charity Hospital during the steaming nights, he continues his work as a music teacher during the day. When he is asked to pass a message from a runaway slave to the servant of one of his students, January finds himself swept into a tempest of lies, greed, and murder that rivals the storms battering New Orleans.

Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort During the Time of COVID-19 is a collection of essays, poems, and interviews to serve as a lifeline for negotiating how to connect and thrive during this stressful time of isolation as well as a historical perspective that will remain relevant for years to come.

Weeks ago, Andre Cobb received a much-needed liver transplant. He's ready for his life to finally begin, until one night, when he passes out and wakes up somewhere totally unexpected - in 1969, where he connects with a magnetic boy named Michael. And then, just as suddenly as he arrived, he slips back to present-day Boston, where the family of his donor is waiting to explain that his new liver came with a side effect - the ability to time travel. And they've tasked their youngest son, Blake, with teaching Andre how to use his unexpected new gift.

James Beard award - winning author Adrian Miller vividly tells the stories of the African Americans who worked in the presidential food service as chefs, personal cooks, butlers, stewards, and servers for every First Family since George and Martha Washington. Miller brings together the names and words of more than 150 black men and women who played remarkable roles in unforgettable events in the nation's history.

New York Times bestselling author Brenda Jackson delivers an uplifting story about a woman who experienced a disappointing marriage and doesn’t want to risk heartbreak again. When a casual relationship turns serious, she wonders if love is truly worth a second chance...