Author: D. Watkins
Publisher: Legacy Lit
ISBN: 0306923998
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Book Description
A New York Times bestselling and award-winning author presents a complex story about his coming-of-age journey as a Black boy, from the societal roots of trauma to finding joy. "If I had two wishes, it would be that D. Watkins spend an entire book writing through the terrifying wonder of Black boyness in America, and for every human to read and share this book. I am shaken. Black Boy Smile changed my relationship to writing and me."―Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal At nine years old, D. Watkins has three concerns in life: picking his dad’s Lotto numbers, keeping his Nikes free of creases, and being a man. Directly in his periphery is east Baltimore, a poverty-stricken city battling the height of the crack epidemic just hours from the nation’s capital. Watkins, like many boys around him, is thrust out of childhood and into a world where manhood means surviving by slinging crack on street corners and finding oneself on the right side of pistols. For thirty years, Watkins is forced to safeguard every moment of joy he experiences or risk losing himself entirely. Now, for the first time, Watkins harnesses these moments to tell the story of how he matured into the D. Watkins we know today—beloved author, college professor, editor-at-large of Salon.com, and devoted husband and father. Black Boy Smile lays bare Watkins’s relationship with his father and his brotherhood with the boys around him. He shares candid recollections of early assaults on his body and mind and reveals how he coped using stoic silence disguised as manhood. His harrowing pursuit of redemption, written in his signature street style, pinpoints how generational hardship, left raw and unnurtured, breeds toxic masculinity. Watkins discovers a love for books, is admitted to two graduate programs, meets with his future wife, an attorney—and finds true freedom in fatherhood. Equally moving and liberating, Black Boy Smile is D. Watkins’s love letter to Black boys in concrete cities, a daring testimony that brings to life the contradictions, fears, and hopes of boys hurdling headfirst into adulthood. Black Boy Smile is a story proving that when we acknowledge the fallacies of our past, we can uncover the path toward self-discovery. Black Boy Smile is the story of a Black boy who healed.
Black Boy
Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061935484
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 460
Book Description
Richard Wright's powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. It is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment--a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering. When Black Boy exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, it caused a sensation. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Opposing forces felt compelled to comment: addressing Congress, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi argued that the purpose of this book “was to plant seeds of hate and devilment in the minds of every American.” From 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.” The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive. Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi, with poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those about him; at six he was a “drunkard,” hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo."
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061935484
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 460
Book Description
Richard Wright's powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. It is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment--a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering. When Black Boy exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, it caused a sensation. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Opposing forces felt compelled to comment: addressing Congress, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi argued that the purpose of this book “was to plant seeds of hate and devilment in the minds of every American.” From 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.” The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive. Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi, with poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those about him; at six he was a “drunkard,” hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo."
Black Boy Out of Time
Author: Hari Ziyad
Publisher: Little A
ISBN: 9781542091312
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Book Description
An eloquent, restless, and enlightening memoir by one of the most thought-provoking journalists today about growing up Black and queer in America, reuniting with the past, and coming of age their own way. One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. Exploring childhood, gender, race, and the trust that is built, broken, and repaired through generations, Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them. Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad's vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead. It offers us a new way to think about survival and the necessary disruption of social norms. It looks back in tenderness as well as justified rage, forces us to address where we are now, and, born out of hope, illuminates the possibilities for the future.
Publisher: Little A
ISBN: 9781542091312
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Book Description
An eloquent, restless, and enlightening memoir by one of the most thought-provoking journalists today about growing up Black and queer in America, reuniting with the past, and coming of age their own way. One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. Exploring childhood, gender, race, and the trust that is built, broken, and repaired through generations, Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them. Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad's vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead. It offers us a new way to think about survival and the necessary disruption of social norms. It looks back in tenderness as well as justified rage, forces us to address where we are now, and, born out of hope, illuminates the possibilities for the future.
A Black Boy at Eton
Author: Dillibe Onyeama
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241993830
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
'The story [Onyeama] had to tell was so gripping and shocking, it wouldn't let me go . . . A remarkably well-written memoir' Bernardine Evaristo, from the Introduction Dillibe was the second black boy to study at Eton - joining in 1965 - and the first to complete his education there. Written at just 21, this is a deeply personal, revelatory account of the racism he endured during his time as a student at the prestigious institution. He tells in vivid detail of his own background as the son of a Nigerian judge at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, of his arrival at the school, of the curriculum, of his reception by other boys (and masters), and of his punishments. He tells, too, of the cruel racial prejudice and his reactions to it, and of the alienation and stereotyping he faced at such a young age. A Black Boy at Eton is a searing, ground-breaking book displaying the deep psychological effects of colonialism and racism. A title in the Black Britain: Writing Back series - selected by Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo, this series rediscovers and celebrates pioneering books depicting black Britain that remap the nation.
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241993830
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
'The story [Onyeama] had to tell was so gripping and shocking, it wouldn't let me go . . . A remarkably well-written memoir' Bernardine Evaristo, from the Introduction Dillibe was the second black boy to study at Eton - joining in 1965 - and the first to complete his education there. Written at just 21, this is a deeply personal, revelatory account of the racism he endured during his time as a student at the prestigious institution. He tells in vivid detail of his own background as the son of a Nigerian judge at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, of his arrival at the school, of the curriculum, of his reception by other boys (and masters), and of his punishments. He tells, too, of the cruel racial prejudice and his reactions to it, and of the alienation and stereotyping he faced at such a young age. A Black Boy at Eton is a searing, ground-breaking book displaying the deep psychological effects of colonialism and racism. A title in the Black Britain: Writing Back series - selected by Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo, this series rediscovers and celebrates pioneering books depicting black Britain that remap the nation.
Growing Up Ugly
Author: James Rolling, Jr.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781937598006
Category : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
What's the one area from your past that you keep getting your flesh caught in over and over again? Where are you still wounded and bleeding? The good news is that the most unanticipated and rewarding turns in the story often start with the ugliest beginnings. Growing Up Ugly is an inspirational coming-of-age memoir that traces the upbringing of a painfully shy child with chronically low self-esteem--a gifted student reprimanded for daydreaming too much and raised in a struggling inner-city New York neighborhood who emerged to become an artist, a leading educator, and an award-winning scholar. In this new release from Simple Word Publications, author James Haywood Rolling, Jr. composes a rich canvas of raw vignettes, family photos, original illustrations, and vivid poems in order to sketch a candid self-portrait of a Black boy unlocking his creative superpowers. Growing Up Ugly tells the story of: The author's upbringing as the first-born son and namesake of a talented professional artist...and domineering father; the unexpected personal consequences of being bused to school daily from a racially segregated area of Crown Heights to a mostly white neighborhood far across Brooklyn; how being identified and tracked since elementary school as a gifted student contributed to a dangerously distorted view of his own capabilities--until God intervened. No matter who or what first made you feel ugly, here is storytelling that elevates its readers beyond their own trauma, social anxiety, and self-doubt. This is a book for anyone who has ever been underestimated, bullied, abused, or simply overlooked as you reimagine your way from daydreams to destiny. Growing Up Ugly makes a great gift for any family raising children of color, or for adults mentoring or teaching Black boys. An in-depth reflection on the power to reshape how one's presence is seen and felt in the world, this book is also an ideal addition to libraries serving multicultural populations!
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781937598006
Category : BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
What's the one area from your past that you keep getting your flesh caught in over and over again? Where are you still wounded and bleeding? The good news is that the most unanticipated and rewarding turns in the story often start with the ugliest beginnings. Growing Up Ugly is an inspirational coming-of-age memoir that traces the upbringing of a painfully shy child with chronically low self-esteem--a gifted student reprimanded for daydreaming too much and raised in a struggling inner-city New York neighborhood who emerged to become an artist, a leading educator, and an award-winning scholar. In this new release from Simple Word Publications, author James Haywood Rolling, Jr. composes a rich canvas of raw vignettes, family photos, original illustrations, and vivid poems in order to sketch a candid self-portrait of a Black boy unlocking his creative superpowers. Growing Up Ugly tells the story of: The author's upbringing as the first-born son and namesake of a talented professional artist...and domineering father; the unexpected personal consequences of being bused to school daily from a racially segregated area of Crown Heights to a mostly white neighborhood far across Brooklyn; how being identified and tracked since elementary school as a gifted student contributed to a dangerously distorted view of his own capabilities--until God intervened. No matter who or what first made you feel ugly, here is storytelling that elevates its readers beyond their own trauma, social anxiety, and self-doubt. This is a book for anyone who has ever been underestimated, bullied, abused, or simply overlooked as you reimagine your way from daydreams to destiny. Growing Up Ugly makes a great gift for any family raising children of color, or for adults mentoring or teaching Black boys. An in-depth reflection on the power to reshape how one's presence is seen and felt in the world, this book is also an ideal addition to libraries serving multicultural populations!
Black Boy Smile
Author: D. Watkins
Publisher: Legacy Lit
ISBN: 0306923998
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Book Description
A New York Times bestselling and award-winning author presents a complex story about his coming-of-age journey as a Black boy, from the societal roots of trauma to finding joy. "If I had two wishes, it would be that D. Watkins spend an entire book writing through the terrifying wonder of Black boyness in America, and for every human to read and share this book. I am shaken. Black Boy Smile changed my relationship to writing and me."―Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal At nine years old, D. Watkins has three concerns in life: picking his dad’s Lotto numbers, keeping his Nikes free of creases, and being a man. Directly in his periphery is east Baltimore, a poverty-stricken city battling the height of the crack epidemic just hours from the nation’s capital. Watkins, like many boys around him, is thrust out of childhood and into a world where manhood means surviving by slinging crack on street corners and finding oneself on the right side of pistols. For thirty years, Watkins is forced to safeguard every moment of joy he experiences or risk losing himself entirely. Now, for the first time, Watkins harnesses these moments to tell the story of how he matured into the D. Watkins we know today—beloved author, college professor, editor-at-large of Salon.com, and devoted husband and father. Black Boy Smile lays bare Watkins’s relationship with his father and his brotherhood with the boys around him. He shares candid recollections of early assaults on his body and mind and reveals how he coped using stoic silence disguised as manhood. His harrowing pursuit of redemption, written in his signature street style, pinpoints how generational hardship, left raw and unnurtured, breeds toxic masculinity. Watkins discovers a love for books, is admitted to two graduate programs, meets with his future wife, an attorney—and finds true freedom in fatherhood. Equally moving and liberating, Black Boy Smile is D. Watkins’s love letter to Black boys in concrete cities, a daring testimony that brings to life the contradictions, fears, and hopes of boys hurdling headfirst into adulthood. Black Boy Smile is a story proving that when we acknowledge the fallacies of our past, we can uncover the path toward self-discovery. Black Boy Smile is the story of a Black boy who healed.
Publisher: Legacy Lit
ISBN: 0306923998
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Book Description
A New York Times bestselling and award-winning author presents a complex story about his coming-of-age journey as a Black boy, from the societal roots of trauma to finding joy. "If I had two wishes, it would be that D. Watkins spend an entire book writing through the terrifying wonder of Black boyness in America, and for every human to read and share this book. I am shaken. Black Boy Smile changed my relationship to writing and me."―Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal At nine years old, D. Watkins has three concerns in life: picking his dad’s Lotto numbers, keeping his Nikes free of creases, and being a man. Directly in his periphery is east Baltimore, a poverty-stricken city battling the height of the crack epidemic just hours from the nation’s capital. Watkins, like many boys around him, is thrust out of childhood and into a world where manhood means surviving by slinging crack on street corners and finding oneself on the right side of pistols. For thirty years, Watkins is forced to safeguard every moment of joy he experiences or risk losing himself entirely. Now, for the first time, Watkins harnesses these moments to tell the story of how he matured into the D. Watkins we know today—beloved author, college professor, editor-at-large of Salon.com, and devoted husband and father. Black Boy Smile lays bare Watkins’s relationship with his father and his brotherhood with the boys around him. He shares candid recollections of early assaults on his body and mind and reveals how he coped using stoic silence disguised as manhood. His harrowing pursuit of redemption, written in his signature street style, pinpoints how generational hardship, left raw and unnurtured, breeds toxic masculinity. Watkins discovers a love for books, is admitted to two graduate programs, meets with his future wife, an attorney—and finds true freedom in fatherhood. Equally moving and liberating, Black Boy Smile is D. Watkins’s love letter to Black boys in concrete cities, a daring testimony that brings to life the contradictions, fears, and hopes of boys hurdling headfirst into adulthood. Black Boy Smile is a story proving that when we acknowledge the fallacies of our past, we can uncover the path toward self-discovery. Black Boy Smile is the story of a Black boy who healed.
Mama's Boy
Author: Dustin Lance Black
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524733288
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418
Book Description
This heartfelt, deeply personal memoir explores how a celebrated filmmaker and activist and his conservative Mormon mother built bridges across today’s great divides—and how our stories hold the power to heal. • Adapted as an HBO documentary now streaming on HBO Max. “A beautifully written, utterly compelling account of growing up poor and gay with a thrice married, physically disabled, deeply religious Mormon mother, and the imprint this irrepressible woman made on the character of Dustin Lance Black.” —Jon Krakauer, bestselling author of Missoula and Under the Banner of Heaven Dustin Lance Black wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Milk and helped overturn California’s anti–gay marriage Proposition 8, but as an LGBTQ activist he has unlikely origins—a conservative Mormon household outside San Antonio, Texas. There he was raised by a single mother who, as a survivor of childhood polio, endured brutal surgeries as well as braces and crutches for life. Despite the abuse and violence of two questionably devised Mormon marriages, she imbued Lance with her inner strength and irrepressible optimism. When Lance came out to his mother at age twenty-one, she initially derided his sexuality as a sinful choice. It may seem like theirs was a house destined to be divided—and at times it was. But in the end, they did not let their differences define them or the relationship that had inspired two remarkable lives. This heartfelt, deeply personal memoir explores how a mother and son built bridges across great cultural divides—and how our stories hold the power to heal.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524733288
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418
Book Description
This heartfelt, deeply personal memoir explores how a celebrated filmmaker and activist and his conservative Mormon mother built bridges across today’s great divides—and how our stories hold the power to heal. • Adapted as an HBO documentary now streaming on HBO Max. “A beautifully written, utterly compelling account of growing up poor and gay with a thrice married, physically disabled, deeply religious Mormon mother, and the imprint this irrepressible woman made on the character of Dustin Lance Black.” —Jon Krakauer, bestselling author of Missoula and Under the Banner of Heaven Dustin Lance Black wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Milk and helped overturn California’s anti–gay marriage Proposition 8, but as an LGBTQ activist he has unlikely origins—a conservative Mormon household outside San Antonio, Texas. There he was raised by a single mother who, as a survivor of childhood polio, endured brutal surgeries as well as braces and crutches for life. Despite the abuse and violence of two questionably devised Mormon marriages, she imbued Lance with her inner strength and irrepressible optimism. When Lance came out to his mother at age twenty-one, she initially derided his sexuality as a sinful choice. It may seem like theirs was a house destined to be divided—and at times it was. But in the end, they did not let their differences define them or the relationship that had inspired two remarkable lives. This heartfelt, deeply personal memoir explores how a mother and son built bridges across great cultural divides—and how our stories hold the power to heal.
Punch Me Up to the Gods
Author: Brian Broome
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0358439108
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Book Description
Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. --
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0358439108
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Book Description
Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. --
Bronx Boy
Author: Jerome Charyn
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312278106
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
"Still known as "Baby", although a younger brother has come along, young Charyn makes pocket money delivering eggs, belongs to a group of twelve-year-old wannabe gangsters who meet in a soda shop run by an ex-con, and spends afternoons telling stories to the adoring wife of a wealthy Russian emigre. He becomes famous for his black-and-tans - a concoction of coffee ice cream, seltzer, milk, chocolate sauce, crushed pecans, and "a touch of bitterness that may have been the Bronx". So famous, indeed, that he walks away the winner of an annual black-and-tan contest sponsored by the real-life top gangster, called "The Little Man", Meyer Lansky."--BOOK JACKET.
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312278106
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Book Description
"Still known as "Baby", although a younger brother has come along, young Charyn makes pocket money delivering eggs, belongs to a group of twelve-year-old wannabe gangsters who meet in a soda shop run by an ex-con, and spends afternoons telling stories to the adoring wife of a wealthy Russian emigre. He becomes famous for his black-and-tans - a concoction of coffee ice cream, seltzer, milk, chocolate sauce, crushed pecans, and "a touch of bitterness that may have been the Bronx". So famous, indeed, that he walks away the winner of an annual black-and-tan contest sponsored by the real-life top gangster, called "The Little Man", Meyer Lansky."--BOOK JACKET.
American Hunger
Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062041509
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Book Description
The compelling continuation of Richard Wright's great autobiographical work, Black Boy Anyone who has read Richard Wright's Black Boy knows it to be one of the great American autobiographies. Covering Wright's early life in the South, the book concludes with his departure in 1934 for a new life in the North. American Hunger (first published more than thirty years after the appearance of Black Boy) is the continuation of that story. A vital, richly anecdotal work, American Hunger treats with feeling and often with wry humor Wright's struggle to make his way in the North—in Chicago—as a store clerk, dishwasher, and eventually as a writer. He deals movingly with his early days in the Communist Party and with his attempts to keep his integrity in the face of Party demands that he subordinate his artistic goals to its needs. And he recounts with a mixture of pain and irony his break with the Party and the tortured period of ostracism that followed. There is an unsettling and totally frank personal story here, and a lot of raw social history as well.
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062041509
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 137
Book Description
The compelling continuation of Richard Wright's great autobiographical work, Black Boy Anyone who has read Richard Wright's Black Boy knows it to be one of the great American autobiographies. Covering Wright's early life in the South, the book concludes with his departure in 1934 for a new life in the North. American Hunger (first published more than thirty years after the appearance of Black Boy) is the continuation of that story. A vital, richly anecdotal work, American Hunger treats with feeling and often with wry humor Wright's struggle to make his way in the North—in Chicago—as a store clerk, dishwasher, and eventually as a writer. He deals movingly with his early days in the Communist Party and with his attempts to keep his integrity in the face of Party demands that he subordinate his artistic goals to its needs. And he recounts with a mixture of pain and irony his break with the Party and the tortured period of ostracism that followed. There is an unsettling and totally frank personal story here, and a lot of raw social history as well.
The 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time
Author: Robert McCrum
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781903385838
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Beginning in 1611 with the King James Bible and ending in 2014 with Elizabeth Kolbert's 'The Sixth Extinction', this extraordinary voyage through the written treasures of our culture examines universally-acclaimed classics such as Pepys' 'Diaries', Charles Darwin's 'The Origin of Species', Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and a whole host of additional works --
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781903385838
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Beginning in 1611 with the King James Bible and ending in 2014 with Elizabeth Kolbert's 'The Sixth Extinction', this extraordinary voyage through the written treasures of our culture examines universally-acclaimed classics such as Pepys' 'Diaries', Charles Darwin's 'The Origin of Species', Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and a whole host of additional works --