Inspired by the University of Illinois's celebration of the Brown v. Board of Education decision's fiftieth anniversary, this collection addresses the significance of Brown in the contributors' lives or work in education and civil rights. Several authors describe their personal roles in the Brown case or similar cases, while others examine and illustrate events, performances, and exhibitions that were part of the anniversary commemoration. The book not only explo...

The true story of a family's fight for their educational future in "a sure-to-be-classic account of 1960s desegregation" ( Los Angeles Times ).With an Introduction by New York Times –bestselling author Marian Wright Edelman"The most important thing we can give our children is an education." —Mae Bertha CarterIn 1965, the Carters, an Afric...

Kristina, the second of four children, begins by telling how a little sip of vodka sipped secretly at a party her parents were giving started her on a pathway to addiction. In that instant, alcohol became her pathway to comfort. Over the next eight years she sinks further into addiction, moving on to cocaine and methamphetamines. In telling her story, she gives a brutally honest description of her addiction and crimes.Adding a heart-wrenching counterpart, to each chapter of the boo...

**From the New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage.With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist," author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man's deception, a family's complicity, and the two teenage girls caught in the middle.**Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families—the public one and the secret...

"Stripped-down . . . sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams's best songs," in an Oprah's book club pick about married life in Appalachia ( The New York Times Book Review ).Young Julie Harmon works "hard as a man," they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen s...

Isadora Tattlin is the American wife of a European energy consultant posted to Havana in the 1990s. Wisely, the witty Mrs. Tattlin began a diary the day her husband informed her of their new assignment. One of the first entries is her shopping list of things to take, including six gallons of shampoo. For although the Tattlins were provided with a wonderful, big house in Havana, complete with a staff of seven, there wasn't much else money could buy in a country whose shelves are nearly bare...

This is the brutal history of Auckland Island, a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean that faces year-round freezing rain and howling winds, making it one of the most forbidding places in the world—where to be shipwrecked means almost certain death.In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relent...

The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents wit...

"The Girl Who Fell from the Sky can actually fly." — The New York Times Book ReviewRachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop.Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African American grandmother as her guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty...

In the segregated South, a young girl’s life is changed forever: “A beautifully written literary novel [and] a real page-turner.” —Lee Smith, New York Times-bestselling author of Blue MarlinOn a scorching day in August 1954, thirteen-year-old Jubie Watts leaves Charlotte, North Carolina, with her family for a Florida vacation. Crammed into the Packard along with Jubie are her three siblings, her mother, and the family’s black maid, Mary Luther. Fo...

In this true story, Armande Martel, a young nun from Quebec, is arrested by the Germans in 1940 during a stay at her religious order’s mother house in Brittany. She spends the war years in a German concentration camp. After her return to Canada, she leaves the Church, finds the love of her life in Montreal, and adopts Lise Dion.Growing up, Lise is familiar with only a few facts of her mother’s past. It’s when she clears her mother’s small apartment after her death that Lise Dion di...

Winner of the Helen and Stan Vine Jewish Book Award and finalist for the Man Booker Prize In Far to Go, one of our most accomplished young writers takes us inside the world of an affluent Jewish family in Prague during the lead-up to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia.In 1939, Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are secular Jews whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of Hitler. They are unable to leave the country in time to avoid deportation, but they do manage to get their six-year-old...