In 1970, Kenneth Gibson was elected as Newark, New Jersey’s first African-American mayor, a position he held for an impressive sixteen years. Yet even as Gibson served as a trailblazer for black politicians, he presided over a troubled time in the city’s history, as Newark’s industries declined and its crime and unemployment rates soared.This book offers a balanced assessment of Gibson’s leadership and his legacy, from the perspectives of the people most deeply immersed in 1970s an...

Unfinished Agenda offers an inside look at the Black Power Movement that emerged during the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties. A political memoir that teaches grass-roots politics and inspires organizing for real change in the Age of Obama, this book will appeal to readers of black history, Occupy Wall Street organizers, and armchair political advocates.Based on notes, interviews, and articles from the 1950s to present day, Junius Williams's inspiring memoir describes h...

National BestsellerIn this nuanced and complex portrait of Barack Obama, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Remnick offers a thorough, intricate, and riveting account of the unique experiences that shaped our nation’s first African American president.Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, Remnick explores the elite institutions that first exposed Obama to social tensions, and...

“This isn’t a story about black people—it’s a story about the Left’s agenda to patronize blacks and lie to everyone else.”For decades, the Left has been putting on a play with themselves as heroes in an ongoing civil rights movement—which they were mostly absent from at the time. Long after pervasive racial discrimination ended, they kept pretending America was being run by the Klan and that liberals were black America’s only protectors.It took the O. J. Simpson verdict—the...

A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it.Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charlest...

Barack Obama's inspirational politics and personal mythology have overshadowed his fascinating history. Young Mr. Obama gives us the missing chapter: the portrait of the politician as a young leader, often too ambitious for his own good, but still equipped with a rare ability to inspire change. The route to the White House began on the streets of Chicago's South Side.Edward McClelland, a veteran Chicago journalist, tells the real story of the first black president's politi...

In The Greatest Generation, his landmark bestseller, Tom Brokaw eloquently evoked for America what it meant to come of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Now, in Boom!, one of America’s premier journalists gives us an epic portrait of another defining era in America as he brings to life the tumultuous Sixties, a fault line in American history. The voices and stories of both famous people and ordinary citizens come together as Brokaw takes us on a memorable j...

Named a Washington Post Book to ReadA New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceA USA Today “New and Noteworthy” PickARead It Forward* Favorite ReadAParade* Magazine PickCoretta Scott King's true story, told in full for the first time....

At its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, Detroit's status as epicenter of the American auto industry made it a vibrant, populous, commercial hub—and then the bottom fell out. Detroit : A Biography takes a long, unflinching look at the evolution of one of America's great cities and one of the nation's greatest urban failures. This authoritative yet accessible narrative seeks to explain how the city grew to become the heart of American industry and how its utter collapse—from ...

The companion book to the PBS series—a timeline and chronicle of the fifty years of black history in the U.S. in more than 350 photos.Beginning with the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965, And Still I Rise explores a half-century of the African American experience. More than fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the birth of Black Power, the United States has had a black president and black CEOs running Fortune 500 companies—as ...

In one of the most unprecedented developments in the history of national politics, George W. Bush abruptly emerged to lead all presidential aspirants in the national polls for the 2000 election. Yet voters know very little about the man, beyond his famous name and his place in one of the nation's most powerful political dynasties.First Son is a true, riveting family saga about extraordinary power and politics in America and in the unharnessed state--a state of mind...

An irreverent, yet powerful exploration of race relations by the New York Times-bestselling author of The Chris Farley ShowFrank, funny, and incisive, Some of My Best Friends Are Black offers a profoundly honest portrait of race in America. In a book that is part reportage, part history, part social commentary, Tanner Colby explores why the civil rights movement ultimately produced such little true integration in schools, neighborhoods, o...