Skinfolk A Memoir

Author : Matthew Pratt Guterl
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
ISBN 13 : 132409172X
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Skinfolk: A Memoir written by Matthew Pratt Guterl and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunting, poignant story of growing up in a mixed-race family in 1970s New Jersey, in the tradition of The Color of Water. Race is made, not born. It can materialize with a thunderous suddenness. It can happen to you in moments that will be cauterized into memory as if into flesh. Could a picturesque white house with a picket fence save the world? What if it was filled with children drawn together from around the globe? And what if, within the yard, the lines of kin and skin, of family and race, were deliberately knotted and twisted? In 1970, a wild-eyed dreamer, Bob Guterl, believed it could. Bob was determined to solve, in one stroke, the problems of overpopulation and racism. The charming, larger-than-life lawyer and his brilliant wife, Sheryl, a former homecoming queen, launched a radical experiment to raise their two biological sons alongside four children adopted from Korea, Vietnam, and the South Bronx—the so-called war zones of the American century. They moved to rural New Jersey with dreams of creating what Bob described as a new Noah’s ark, filled with “two of every race.” While the venture made for a great photograph, with the proverbial “casseroles and potato chips out for everyone,” the Brady Brunch façade began to crack once reality seeped into the yard, adding undue complexity to the ordinary drama of a big family. Neighbors began to stare. Vacations went wrong. Joy and laughter commingled with discomfort and alienation. Familial bonds inevitably buckled. In the end, this picture-perfect family was no longer, and memories of the idyllic undertaking were marred by tragedy. In lyrical yet wrenching prose, Matthew Pratt Guterl, one of the children, narrates a family saga of astonishing originality, in which even the best intentions would prove woefully inadequate. He takes us inside the clapboard house where Bob and Sheryl raised their makeshift brood in a nation riven then as now by virulent racism and xenophobia. Chronicling both the humor and pathos of this experiment, he “opens a door to our dreams of what the idea of family might make possible.” In the tradition of James McBride’s The Color of Water, Skinfolk exposes the joys and constraints of love, blood, and belonging, and the persistent river of racial violence in America, past and present.

Author : Nalo Hopkinson
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1504001192
Total Pages : 165 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Skin Folk written by Nalo Hopkinson and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The SFWA Grand Master’s award-winning collection “combines a richly textured multicultural background with incisive storytelling” (Library Journal). In Skin Folk, with works ranging from science fiction to Caribbean folklore, passionate love to chilling horror, Nalo Hopkinson is at her award-winning best, spinning tales like “Precious,” in which the narrator spews valuable coins and gems from her mouth whenever she attempts to talk or sing. In “A Habit of Waste,” a self-conscious woman undergoes elective surgery to alter her appearance; days later she’s shocked to see her former body climbing onto a public bus. In “The Glass Bottle Trick,” the young protagonist ignores her intuition regarding her new husband’s superstitions—to horrifying consequences. Hopkinson’s unique pacing and vibrant dialogue sets a steady beat for stories that illustrate why she received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Entertaining, challenging, and alluring, Skin Folk is not to be missed. Praise for Nalo Hopkinson and the World Fantasy Award–winning Skin Folk “Hopkinson’s prose is vivid and immediate.” —The Washington Post Book World “An important new writer.” —The Dallas Morning News “Her descriptions of ordinary people finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances ring true, the result of her strong evocation of place and her ear for dialect.” —Publishers Weekly “A marvelous display of Nalo Hopkinson’s talents, skills and insights into the human conditions of life, especially of the fantastic realities of the Caribbean . . . Everything is possible in her imagination.” —Science Fiction Chronicle

Author : Matthew Pratt Guterl
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674369971
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe written by Matthew Pratt Guterl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-14 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creating a sensation with her risqué nightclub act and strolls down the Champs Elysées, pet cheetah in tow, Josephine Baker lives on in popular memory as the banana-skirted siren of Jazz Age Paris. In Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe, Matthew Pratt Guterl brings out a little known side of the celebrated personality, showing how her ambitions of later years were even more daring and subversive than the youthful exploits that made her the first African American superstar. Her performing days numbered, Baker settled down in a sixteenth-century chateau she named Les Milandes, in the south of France. Then, in 1953, she did something completely unexpected and, in the context of racially sensitive times, outrageous. Adopting twelve children from around the globe, she transformed her estate into a theme park, complete with rides, hotels, a collective farm, and singing and dancing. The main attraction was her Rainbow Tribe, the family of the future, which showcased children of all skin colors, nations, and religions living together in harmony. Les Milandes attracted an adoring public eager to spend money on a utopian vision, and to worship at the feet of Josephine, mother of the world. Alerting readers to some of the contradictions at the heart of the Rainbow Tribe project—its undertow of child exploitation and megalomania in particular—Guterl concludes that Baker was a serious and determined activist who believed she could make a positive difference by creating a family out of the troublesome material of race.

Author :
Publisher : Publishers Lunch
ISBN 13 : 1948586576
Total Pages : 1267 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Buzz Books 2023: Spring/Summer written by and published by Publishers Lunch. This book was released on 2023-01-13 with total page 1267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buzz Books 2023: Spring/Summer is the 22th volume in our popular sampler series. As always, Buzz Books presents passionate readers with an insider’s look at 54 of the buzziest books due out this season. Such major bestselling authors as Ryan Holiday, Nancy Horan, Kate Morton, and Abraham Verghese are featured, along with literary greats Jamel Brinkley, Eleanor Catton, Patrick DeWitt, and Cathleen Schine. Other sure-to-be readers’ favorites are a fiction debut by celebrated nonfiction author Helen MacDonald and an adult debut by acclaimed YA author Elizabeth Acevedo. Buzz Books has had a particularly stellar track record with highlighting the most talented, exciting and diverse debut authors, and this edition is no exception. Shelly Read’s Go As A River, one of a bumper crop of 23 debuts titles, has already been sold to 27 countries. Among the others are Monica Brashears, Tembe Denton-Hurst, Katherine Lin, Janika Oza, and Tyriek White. Our robust nonfiction section covers such fascinating subjects as the native peoples in America; a literary memoir of growing up with a reggae musician father who was a member of a strict Rastafari sect; and a definitive biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Bestselling stoicism guru Ryan Holliday offers wisdom for dads, while David Von Drehle provides wisdom from a 102-year-old. Finally, we present early looks at new work from young adult authors, including: Throwback by Maurene Goo, Queen Bee by Amalie Howard, and Lucha Of The Night Forest by Tehlor Kay Mejia. Be sure to look out for Buzz Books 2023: Fall/Winter, coming in May.

Author : Tochi Onyebuchi
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780999431696
Total Pages : 162 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book (s)Kinfolk: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (...Afterwords) written by Tochi Onyebuchi and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. When Did You First Realize You Were Black? Provoked by the fraught relationship between the African continent and American culture in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, acclaimed Nigerian-American novelist Tochi Onyebuchi takes an emotional and intellectual journey through his own education in Blackness--his first loves, his introduction to politics, and his eventual commitment to the struggle. Ranging from Paris to a Connecticut boarding school to a harrowing walk through the streets of Palestine, and touching on lessons from Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Mohsin Hamid, August Wilson, Dear White People, and Black Panther, Onyebuchi blends memoir and cultural criticism to explore the ways in which identities, like diamonds, are pressurized into existence by suffering, and how "the other side of suffering is self-determination." (S)KINFOLK culminates in a trip to Nigeria, the homeland, where the author realizes that "we share a future," as Black Americans and Africans, on this "asymptotic journey" toward self-actualization.

Author : Carole Simpson
Publisher : Author House
ISBN 13 : 1452062374
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Newslady written by Carole Simpson and published by Author House. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NewsLady is the memoir of a trailblazing African American woman journalist whose life is about firsts. Carole Simpson was the first woman to broadcast radio news in Chicago, the first African American woman to anchor a local newscast in the same city, the first African American woman national network television correspondent, the first African American woman to anchor a national network newscast and the first woman or minority to moderate a presidential debate. Hers is a story of survival in a male-dominated profession that placed the highest premium on white males. In this book she recounts how she endured and conquered sex discrimination and racial prejudice to reach the top ranks of her profession. Along the way she covered some of the most important news events over the four decades of her illustrious broadcasting career. Her inspirational story is for all trying to succeed in a corporate environment.

Author : Reannon Muth
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unattached written by Reannon Muth and published by . This book was released on 2021-12 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone thinks 33-year-old travel writer Reannon Muth is brave for backpacking through dozens of countries on her own. But what Reannon's friends, travel blog readers, and boyfriend don't know is Reannon has an anxiety disorder that makes it difficult for her to get close to people. She's afraid to ask for help, she's afraid to be vulnerable, but most of all, she's afraid to be herself. When Reannon suffers a stunning loss, her fearless façade begins to crumble, and she decides to hike Mount Whitney--the tallest mountain in the contiguous US. But as she embarks on her biggest adventure yet, Reannon realizes if she has any hope of healing, she must face her fears or risk losing everything, including her one chance at real love.

Author : Patricia Williams
Publisher : The New Press
ISBN 13 : 1620978237
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Miracle of the Black Leg written by Patricia Williams and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant essays from the renowned Nation columnist—aka the Mad Law Professor—tackling questions of identity, bioethics, race, surveillance, and more Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a Black man’s leg surgically attached (with the expired Black leg-donor in the foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core questions of identity, ethics, and race. With her trademark elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings to bear a keen analytic eye and a lawyer’s training to chapters exploring the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body parts to gene sequences—and the particular ways in which our laws in these areas isolate nonnormative looks, minority cultures, and out-of-the-box thinkers. At the heart of “Wrongful Birth” is a lawsuit in which a white couple who use a sperm bank sue when their child “comes out Black”; “Bodies in Law” explores the service of genetic ancestry testing companies to answer the question of who owns DNA. And “Hot Cheeto Girl” examines the way that algorithms give rise to new predictive categories of human assortment, layered with market-inflected cages of assigned destiny. In the spirit of Dorothy Roberts, Rebecca Skloot, and Anne Fadiman, The Miracle of the Black Leg offers a brilliant meditation on the tricky place where law, science, ethics, and cultural slippage collide.

Author : Sarah Lewis
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674238346
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Unseen Truth written by Sarah Lewis and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Lewis unearths the critical moment when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation's racial regime and learned to disregard them. When popular nineteenth-century images of the Caucasus proved the lie of white supremacy, a new visual regime arose to suppress the evidence of the incoherence of racial order.

Author : Emma Dabiri
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062966731
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Twisted written by Emma Dabiri and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Kirkus Best Book of the Year Stamped from the Beginning meets You Can't Touch My Hair in this timely and resonant essay collection from Guardian contributor and prominent BBC race correspondent Emma Dabiri, exploring the ways in which black hair has been appropriated and stigmatized throughout history, with ruminations on body politics, race, pop culture, and Dabiri’s own journey to loving her hair. Emma Dabiri can tell you the first time she chemically straightened her hair. She can describe the smell, the atmosphere of the salon, and her mix of emotions when she saw her normally kinky tresses fall down her shoulders. For as long as Emma can remember, her hair has been a source of insecurity, shame, and—from strangers and family alike—discrimination. And she is not alone. Despite increasingly liberal world views, black hair continues to be erased, appropriated, and stigmatized to the point of taboo. Through her personal and historical journey, Dabiri gleans insights into the way racism is coded in society’s perception of black hair—and how it is often used as an avenue for discrimination. Dabiri takes us from pre-colonial Africa, through the Harlem Renaissance, and into today's Natural Hair Movement, exploring everything from women's solidarity and friendship, to the criminalization of dreadlocks, to the dubious provenance of Kim Kardashian's braids. Through the lens of hair texture, Dabiri leads us on a historical and cultural investigation of the global history of racism—and her own personal journey of self-love and finally, acceptance. Deeply researched and powerfully resonant, Twisted proves that far from being only hair, black hairstyling culture can be understood as an allegory for black oppression and, ultimately, liberation.