In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey : first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration...

The co-host of "The View" and ABC News senior legal correspondent traces her journey from a biracial child in a South Bronx housing project to a successful and influential Washington, D.C. attorney and journalist. Growing up half Puerto Rican and half African-American, raised by teenage parents in the South Bronx, Hostin escaped poverty and the turbulence of her early life through hard work, a bit of luck and earning academic scholarships to college...

"In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency--a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil"--‡c Provided by publisher.

"Sarah and Angelina Grimke--the Grimke sisters--are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents...

"Bringing a poetic sensibility to her prose to stunning effect, Lythcott-Haims briskly and stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of a marriage between an African American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called microaggressions, in addition to blunt-force insults, can puncture a person's inner life with a thousand sharp...

"Explores the life of Barack Obama, U.S. Senator from Illinois, and his work as a community organizer, lawyer, and politician"--Provided by publisher

Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college they married. In Amherst, Massachusetts, Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Both the Straight and the Sims families were filled with stories of the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward; their three daughters "carry in their blood at least three continents."...