#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "You will not read a more important book about America this year. "The Economist "A riveting book."The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."David Brooks, New York Times From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of Americas white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis...

An "account of growing up Black, Christian, and female in middle-class white America ... [that looks] at how white, middle-class, evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, inviting the reader to confront apathy, recognize God's ongoing work in the world, and discover how blackness--if we let it--can save us all"--Amazon.com.

Barack Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly catapulted him into the national spotlight and led to his election four years later as America's first African-American president. In this penetrating biography, David J. Garrow delivers an epic work about the life of Barack Obama, creating a rich tapestry of a life little understood, until now. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama captivatingly describes Barack Obama's...

"Walter F. White led two lives: one as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP in the early twentieth century; the other as a white newspaperman who covered lynching crimes in the Deep South at the blazing height of racial violence. Born mixed race and with very fair skin and straight hair, White was able to "pass" for white. He leveraged this ambiguity as a reporter, bringing to light the darkest crimes in America and helping to plant the...

"After following her mother to the US at a young age to pursue economic opportunities, one woman must come to terms with the ways in which systematic racism and resultant trauma keep the American Dream inaccessible to Black people. In the early '90s, young Tiffanie Drayton and her siblings left Trinidad and Tobago to join their mother in New Jersey, where she'd been making her way as a domestic worker, eager to give her children a shot at the American...

This program traces the complex historical roots of modern China, from early encounters with the West to the death of Mao Zedong-a leader who may have shaped his nation more completely than any other man of his era. Pre-eminent for most of two millennia, China's technological, economic, and cultural dominance gradually eroded in the centuries following the European Renaissance. By the late 19th century it had several suffered humiliating defeats at...

In the late 1800s, Maggie Walker, an African American community leader, helped establish a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, a community center, and an educational loan fund, among other humanitarian projects. She was also the first woman in the United States to become founder and president of a chartered bank.