National Network for Equitable Library Service

The story of Foster Beck, the author's late father, whose defense of a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama foreshadowed the trial at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird. As a child, Joseph Beck heard the stories-when other lawyers came up with excuses, his father courageously defended a black man charged with raping a white woman. Now a lawyer himself, Beck reconstructs his father's role in State of Alabama vs. Charles White, Alias, a trial that was much publicized when Harper Lee was twelve years old.

When Damon Tweedy first enters the halls of Duke University Medical School on a full scholarship, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. When one of his first professors mistakes him for a maintenance worker, it is a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his early career.

An autobiography of Val James, the first American-born black hockey player to play in the National Hockey League.

When Billie Holiday stepped into Columbia's studios in November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the most remarkable and influential career in 'twentieth-century popular music. Her voice weathered countless shifts in public taste, and new reincarnations of her continue to arrive, most recently in the form of singers like Amy Winehouse and Adele.

En estasmemorias sobre una nina, dos culturas y la lucha por la libertad, la periodistaMirtaOjito, ganadora del Premio Pulitzer, vuelve al evento en su adolescencia que cambiO su vida para siempre: el Exodo en el 1980 demAs de 125.000 cubanos, conocido como el puente marItimo del Mariel. Con perservancia y mucho corazOn, Ojito logra localizar a los individuos-- ya olvidados por la historia-- cuyas acciones desencadenaron los sucesos que tanto impactaron su vida y la de otros miles de cubanos a ambos lados del Estrecho de la Florida.

Cusk, a best-selling novelist, is acclaimed for her humorous works. Her account of a year of modern motherhood becomes many stories: a farewell to freedom, sleep and time; a lesson in humility and hard work; a journey to the roots of love; and most of all a sentimental education in babies, books, toddler groups, bad advice, crying, breastfeeding, and never being alone.

Delve into the stories from Amy Tan's life that inspired bestselling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan has touched millions of readers with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists.

"A sinister version of The Perfect Storm ... Thrilling." -Sunday Times (UK). For readers of The Perfect Storm, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and Into the Wild There's nothing that armchair adventure lovers relish more than a gripping true story of disaster and heroism, and Last Man Off delivers all that against a breathtaking backdrop of icebergs and killer whales. On June 6, 1998, twenty-three-year-old Matt Lewis had just started his dream job as a scientific observer aboard a deep-sea fishing boat in the waters off Antarctica.

Since the age of 21, Paul McCartney has lived one of the ultimate rock 'n' roll lives played out on the most public of stages. Now Paul's story is told by rock music's foremost biographer, with McCartney's consent and access to family members and close friends who have never spoken on the record before. Paul McCartney: The Life reveals the complex character behind the facade and sheds new light on his childhood-blighted by his mother's death but redeemed by the father who introduced him to music.

The author relates his life as an African American growing up in the South during the Jim Crow years. This version of the autobiography is presented in two parts, as authorized by the author's estate. Part one tells of his painful early years in the Jim Crow South. Part two follows his journey North.