Showing titles in Cultural & Regional

A inspirational memoir by the beloved host of Good Morning America. "Regardless of how much money you have, your race, where you live, what religion you follow, you are going through something. Or you already have or you will. As momma always said, 'Everybody's got something.'" So begins Good...

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died. She was in a car crash on the motorway turnoff to Detroit. For a few minutes, she was clinically dead. From the moment of her resuscitation, we follow a remarkable life, all the way up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. Bernice’s family story begins in Sandersville, Georgia, with freedwoman Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1870. Her descendants survived Reconstruction, Jim Crow, joined the ‘great migration’, cried when Dr King was assassinated. Wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down through generations of women.

Everything you wanted to know about France but were too afraid to ask... At eighteen Lucy Wadham abandoned England and fell into the arms of a Frenchman. Twenty-five years later, having married, had children, and divorced in France, Lucy is perfectly placed to explore the differences between our two countries. Here she examines every aspect of French life - from sex and adultery to money, happiness, race and politics - in this funny and engrossing account of our most intriguing neighbour.

Sadako Teiko Okuda was living in Osaki-shimo, an island off the mainland of Japan, when the bomb hit Hiroshima on the 6th of August 1945. Even sixty kilometers from the city, it was clear something horrific had happened. There was a blinding flash and the window next to Sadako smashed, a shard of glass leaving a painful burn on her neck. Soon, news came that her niece and nephew who lived in Hiroshima were missing. There was only one thing she could do—leave the relative safety of the island and set off into the city to find them.

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, these writers used words to create a liveable world – a “home” – for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society.

 Historian Sunil Khilnani, Professor of History and Politics at Ashoka University, takes listeners on an immersive, whirlwind journey from ancient India to the 21st century through the life stories of 50 remarkable individuals, exploring their surprising legacies and illuminating both the wonders and the urgent conflicts of India today. 

Zwei Rentner aus Sachsen-Anhalt verreisen mit ihrem Sohn. Was soll schon schiefgehen...?! «Urlaub mit den Eltern. Wir sitzen 5 (!) Stunden vor Abflug am Flughafen, und Mutter verzweifelt, weil sie die Bordkarten auf DIN A3 ausgedruckt hat und denkt, dass wir deshalb nicht mitfliegen dürfen.» So begann André Herrmann, 36, Comedian aus Berlin, die Dokumentation seiner Reise mit seinen Eltern, die binnen kürzester Zeit viral ging. Unter dem Hashtag #UmdE berichtet er acht Tage lang von den Unwegsamkeiten der gemeinsamen Reise und begeisterte damit schnell eine riesige Followerschaft.

It’s a war filled with larger than life characters. There will be sledging, accusations of cheating, theft and performance enhancing drugs. And allegations that Australia was cheated out of a Guinness World Record. In the process of charting the scandal-plagued race to breed the world’s hottest chilli, the audio documentary lifts the lid on the subculture of ‘Chilli-heads’, hardcore chilli fans spread across the globe who compete in chilli eating and breeding competitions.

Named a nonfiction book “Everyone Will Be Reading This Summer” by the New York Times “Devastating and hopeful in turn, All That’s Unseen exquisitely captures a complex and contradictory world.” —Jeannette Walls, New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle In her luminous...

عند استقلال سنغافورة، كانت عائدات القاعدة العسكرية البريطانية تمثل ثلاثة أرباع دخلها القومي، مما عزز بعض التشاؤم حول قدرة الدولة الصغيرة على النمو بمفردها. لكن...

A feminist biography of the only woman to become prime minister of Israel In this authoritative and empathetic biography, Pnina Lahav reexamines the life of Golda Meir (1898-1978) through a feminist lens, focusing on her recurring role as a woman standing alone among men. The Only Woman in the Room is the first book to contend with Meir’s full identity as a woman, Jew, Zionist leader, and one of the founders of Israel, providing a richer portrait of her persona and legacy.  

This audio edition includes an Epilogue read by the author, Sami Kent. 'Captivating. Kent effortlessly weaves travels that are close to his heart into a bigger story of Turkey’s past and present' – Mishal Husain 'A rich, spellbinding book: dense with people, stories, history, colour, lived...

“[Lagnado writes] in crystalline yet melodious prose.” —New York Times Lucette Lagnado’s acclaimed, award-winning The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (“[a] crushing, brilliant book” —New York Times Book Review) told the powerfully moving story of her Jewish family’s exile from...

Earl Lovelace is a major Caribbean writer, one of the few of his generation to have lived in and written almost exclusively from the region. With sharp observation and even sharper wit, his writing pulses with the rhythm, flow, and vibrancy of the lives of “ordinary” people, whose culture and language he champions. In this brief but rich biography, Funso Aiyejina explores the writer and his work with the intimacy of a friend and the perceptiveness of a scholar.

In almost 60 years of professional life, John Tusa has fought for and sometimes against the major arts and political institutions in the country. A distinguished journalist, broadcaster and leader of arts organisations, he has stood up publicly for the independence of the BBC, the need for public funding of the arts and for the integrity of universities. He has made enemies in the process.

FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR NON-FICTION Interrogating our ideas of race through the lens of her own multi-racial identity, critically acclaimed novelist Tessa McWatt turns her eye on herself, her body and this world in a powerful new work of non-fiction. Tessa McWatt has been...

Like much of North Korea, Songmi Han lived in desperate poverty. As a child, she and her family endured extreme hardship, with many meals consisting of little more than grass. Domestic abuse, grueling physical labor, emotional abuse, and hunger were constant in her life. School was out of the question, and she and her mother stole food to survive. Greenlight to Freedom: A North Korean Daughter’s Search for Her Mother and Herself, written by Songmi Han and Casey Lartigue Jr., recounts Songmi’s childhood and escape from North Korea in a perilous and gripping narrative.

A formally audacious and deeply moving memoir in three timeframes that confronts the defining trauma of the twentieth century, and its effects on a father and son. In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein’s father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every...

Melissa, an English dominatrix, has just lost her mother. But she has also promised to fly to Massachusetts to play the cane-happy headmistress of a girls’ boarding school in a film funded by a wealthy benefactor—and to give a keynote address on birching bare bottoms at a spanking conference in Texas four weeks later.

What would life be like for a Black boy growing up in Nazi Germany? This unprecedented autobiography answers that question with the spellbinding true story of Hans J. Massaquoi’s life in Hamburg during the height of Hitler’s regime. Hans is the son of a Black Liberian diplomat father and a white German mother. His father returns to Africa at the beginning of the war, leaving them behind in poverty without the means to flee. Within this tense atmosphere, increasingly violent Nazi policies and Allied bombing raids make Hans and his mother’s lives a day-to-day survival struggle.