This is the inspiring story of a modern American icon, the first comprehensive account of the life and times of Michelle Obama.
With disciplined reporting and a storyteller s eye for revealing detail, Peter Slevin follows Michelle to the White House from her working-class childhood on Chicago s largely segregated South Side. He illuminates her tribulations at Princeton University and Harvard Law School during the racially charged 1980s and the dilemmas she faced in Chicago while building a high-powered career, raising a family, and helping a young community organizer named Barack Obama become president of the United States.
From the lessons she learned in Chicago to the messages she shares as one of the most recognizable women in the world, the story of this First Lady is the story of America.
Michelle Obama: A Life is a fresh and compelling view of a woman of unique achievement and purpose.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Like most Americans, you might think of Ben Carson as a trailblazing brain surgeon and, in the last few years, as an outspoken commentator on national issues. But his wife of more than 40 years knows him as so much more: a loving husband, a devoted father, a devout Christian, a committed philanthropist, and a fierce patriot.
Now, Candy Carson introduces us to the private side of a very public figure as she shares the inspiring story of their marriage and their family.
Like her husband, Candy grew up in Detroit, one of five children of a teacher and a factory worker. Also like Ben, she overcame her humble background through determination, hard work, and perseverance, earning a scholarship to attend Yale University. In that strange new world she focused on her studies, her music, and her deepening spiritual life. She attended church with a handsome older student who liked to tease her, but she never assumed he would be anything more than a friend to her.
But Ben and Candy quickly became inseparable, and they married soon after she graduated, with Ben still in medical school, preparing for his career as a soon-to-be world-famous pediatric neurosurgeon.
In A Doctor in the House: My Life With Ben Carson, Candy reveals many stories that have never been told before, despite the media spotlight on Dr. Carson in recent years.
She shows us what it was like when they moved to Baltimore to join the community centered around Johns Hopkins Hospital. She describes how their family evolved with the births of their three sons and the tragic miscarriage of their twins. She talks about the challenges of Ben's 12- to 20-hour workdays, saving thousands of lives every year while Candy ran the household.
She also addresses the prejudice they sometimes faced as African Americans, and how Ben's calm, level-headed approach made him a great problem solver at home and in their travels, just as he was in the operating room.
Above all, Candy reveals her husband's consistency as a believer: in God, in family, and in America. Having lived the American Dream, Ben believes every child from every background is capable of achieving it. That's why he and Candy have been committed to educating and inspiring young people and over the past 20 years have awarded more than 6,700 students with scholarships through their Carson Scholars Fund.
A Doctor in the House is a classic American love story and that story is far from over. As Candy writes, "We don't know what God has for us next, but we're ready to follow. As we head forward into the unknown once more, I thank God for putting us together."
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
This is a powerful polemic on the state of black America that savages the idea of a post-racial society.
America's great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire.
From the murders of black youth by the police, to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, to the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession, it is clear that black America faces an emergency at the very moment the election of the first black president has prompted many to believe we've solved America's race problem.
Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul is Eddie S. Glaude Jr.'s impassioned response. Part manifesto, part history, part memoir, it argues that we live in a country founded on a value gap with white lives valued more than others that still distorts our politics today.
Whether discussing why all Americans have racial habits that reinforce inequality, why black politics based on the civil-rights era have reached a dead end, or why only remaking democracy from the ground up can bring real change, Glaude crystallizes the untenable position of black America and offers thoughts on a better way forward.
Forceful in ideas and unsettling in its candor, Democracy In Black is a landmark book on race in America, one that promises to spark wide discussion as we move toward the end of our first black presidency.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
A modern-day civil rights champion tells the stirring story of how he helped start a movement to bridge America's racial divide.
Over the summer of 2013, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II led more than a hundred thousand people at rallies across North Carolina to protest restrictions to voting access and an extreme makeover of state government. These protests the largest state government focused civil disobedience campaign in American history came to be known as Moral Mondays and have since blossomed in states as diverse as Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New York.
At a time when divide-and-conquer politics are exacerbating racial strife and economic inequality, Rev. Barber offers an impassioned, historically grounded argument that Moral Mondays are hard evidence of an embryonic Third Reconstruction in America.
The first Reconstruction briefly flourished after Emancipation, and the second Reconstruction ushered in meaningful progress in the civil rights era. But both were met by ferocious reactionary measures that severely curtailed, and in many cases rolled back, racial and economic progress. This Third Reconstruction is a profoundly moral awakening of justice-loving people united in a fusion coalition powerful enough to reclaim the possibility of democracy even in the face of corporate-financed extremism.
In this memoir of how Rev. Barber and allies as diverse as progressive Christians, union members, and immigration-rights activists came together to build a coalition, he offers a trenchant analysis of race-based inequality and a hopeful message for a nation grappling with persistent racial and economic injustice.
Rev. Barber writes movingly and pragmatically about how he laid the groundwork for a state-by-state movement that unites black, white, and brown, rich and poor, employed and unemployed, gay and straight, documented and undocumented, religious and secular. Only such a diverse fusion movement, Rev. Barber argues, can heal our nation's wounds and produce public policy that is morally defensible, constitutionally consistent, and economically sane.
The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement is both a blueprint for movement building and an inspiring call to action from the 21t century's most effective grassroots organizer.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
"Let Kathryn in," said Coretta Scott King to authorities. Three simple words provided Kathryn Johnson, a reporter for The Associated Press's Atlanta bureau, unprecedented access to the grieving widow in the days following her husband's death.
Johnson was on her way to a movie date when word came from Memphis that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. She immediately headed for the King home where, despite resistance from authorities on the scene, she was the only reporter allowed inside.
Johnson's many years covering King and his family had earned her the trust to be a discreet, observant witness to the aftermath of a defining moment in American history.
Kathryn Johnson covered the Civil Rights movement across the South in the 1960s, often risking her own safety to observe first-hand the events of this great era. Her stories took her from witnessing the integration of the University of Georgia by dressing as a student, to hiding unobserved under a table near an infamous schoolhouse door in Alabama, to marching with the massive crowd from Selma to Montgomery.
Johnson, one of the only female reporters on the scene, threw herself into charged situations with a determination to break the news no matter what. Including never-before-published photos, My Time With the Kings: A Reporter's Recollections of Martin, Coretta and the Civil Rights Movement is a personal account of this period and a singular addition to the story of the Civil Rights movement.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
How about a revealing collection that restores Dr. King as being every bit as radical as Malcolm X?
The radical King was a democratic socialist who sided with poor and working people in the class struggle taking place in capitalist societies.
The response of the radical King to our catastrophic moment can be put in one word: revolution - a revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life, and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.
Could it be that we know so little of the radical King because such courage defies our market-driven world?
Every year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is celebrated as one of the greatest orators in US history, an ambassador for nonviolence who became perhaps the most recognizable leader of the civil rights movement. But after more than forty years, few people appreciate how truly radical he was.
Arranged thematically in four parts, The Radical King includes 23 selections, curated and introduced by Dr. Cornel West, that illustrate King's revolutionary vision, underscoring his identification with the poor, his unapologetic opposition to the Vietnam War, and his crusade against global imperialism.
As West writes, "Although much of America did not know the radical King - and too few know today - the FBI and US government did. They called him the most dangerous man in America." This book unearths a radical King that we can no longer sanitize.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
Much has been written about black urban empowerment and about the candidates particularly the winning candidates who are the public face of such shifts in power.
Authors invariably mention the important role played by black political organizations in electing black officials or organizing communities, but Micah W. Kubic goes further, making, for the first time, one such organization the focus of a book-length study.
In Freedom, Inc. and Black Political Empowerment, Kubic tells the story of black political empowerment in Kansas City through the prism of Freedom, Inc., the nation's oldest existing black political organization.
Using interviews and observation of participants as well as archival research, Kubic offers historical and political analysis of Freedom, Inc. from its founding in 1962 through its role in municipal elections of 2007. Kubic asserts that strong local organizations are living, dynamic organisms and that they, rather than charismatic candidates or interracial alliances, are the crucial players in both determining political outcomes and advancing black interests in urban areas.
Located in Hunt Valley, Maryland and part of Baltimore County, Greetings & Readings of Hunt Valley is the premier independent gift store in Maryland. Fiction, fashion and fun.
