Barack Obama is arguably the most dynamic political figure to grace the American stage since John F. Kennedy. His meteoric rise from promise to power has stunned even the cynics and inspired a legion of devout followers. For anyone who wants to know more about the man who would be president, David Mendell's Obama is essential reading. Mendell, who has covered Obama for the Chicago Tribune since the beginning of Obama's campaign for the Senate, had... more...

Dr. Marie Maynard Daly received her PhD in Chemistry from Columbia University in 1947. Although she was hardly the first of her race and gender to engage in the field, she was the first African American woman to receive a PhD in chemistry in the United States. In this book, Jeannette Brown, an African American woman chemist herself, will present a wide-ranging historical introduction to the relatively new presence of African American women in the field... more...

Barack Obama Sr., father of the American president, was part of Africa's "independence generation" and in 1959 it seemed his star would shine brightly. He came to the U.S. from Kenya and was given a university scholarship. While in the Hawaii, he met Ann Dunham in 1961, and his son Barack was born. He left his young family to gain a master's degree from Harvard. After that, Obama's life became progressively more complicated. He was a brilliant... more...

World War 2 holocaust survivor stories

"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them."--Create Dangerously In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile, examining what it means to be an immigrant artist from a country in... more...

Renowned as one of the most skilled search dog handlers on both land and sea, Mick McCarthy has over twenty years experience of searching for missing persons. He has experienced first-hand the dangers, thrills, tragedies, and triumphs of search and rescue operations, which he has carried out on flood-swollen rivers, raging seas, through woodland, bog land, and on treacherous mountains, often in the dead of night. This is the captivating story of his... more...

In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. When the author stumbles across a slave narrative in the margins of an ancient text, his curiosity is piqued. What follows is a ten year search, which brings author and slave together across 800 hundred years of colonial history. Bursting with anecdote and exuberant detail, it offers a magical, intimate biography of the private life of a country, Egypt, from the Crusades to... more...

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John and George Keats—Man of Genius and Man of Power, to use John’s words—embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. George’s 1818 move to the western frontier of the United States, an imaginative leap across four thousand miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream, created in John an abysm of alienation and loneliness that would inspire the poet’s most plangent and sublime poetry. Denise Gigante’s account of this... more...

Astonishing True Story of the Miracles That Are Changing AfricaBorn into a long line of witch doctors, Surprise ("Surpresa") Sithole was destined for a life of fear, oppression, and poverty in the jungles of Africa. But at the age of fifteen, he was awakened in the middle of the night by an unfamiliar voice. Urgent, but not harsh, it told him to get up and leave his family immediately. As Surprise stepped out into the night, away from everything dear... more...