Can Anything Beat White

Ann Petry (1908-1997) achieved prominence during a period in which few black women were published with regularity in America. Her novels Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1988), along with various short stories and nonfiction, poignantly described the struggles and triumphs of middle-class blacks living in primarily white communities. Petry's ancestors, the James family, served as inspiration for much of her fiction. This collection of more than four hundred family letters, edited by the daughter of Ann Petry, is an engaging portrait of black family life from the 1890s to the early twentieth century, a period not often documented by African American voices. Ann Petry's maternal grandfather, Willis Samuel James, was a slave taught by his children to read and write. He believed "the best place for the negro is as near the white man as he can get." He followed that "truth," working as coachman for a Connecticut governor and buying a house in a white neighborhood in Hartford. Willis had sixteen children by three wives. The letters in this collection are from him and his second wife, Anna E. Houston James, and five of Anna's children, of whom novelist Ann Petry's mother, Bertha James Lane, was the oldest. History is made and remade by the availability of new documents, sources, and interpretations. Can Anything Beat White? contributes a great deal to this process. The experiences of the James family as documented in their letters challenge both representations of black people at the turn of the century as well as our contemporary sense of black Americans.

Offers a guide to important chess techniques and principles to help players develop the skills needed to beat opponents, from the basics of play to specific tactics and strategies, as well as a look at the world of competitive chess.

Beating egg whites till they're stiff is a metaphor for life – just when you thought your existence would never be more than flaccid transparent snot, something happens to turn it into tight white light. Once a counsellor, nurse and cook and now a writer, television presenter and all-round fabulous woman, Peta Mathias is the queen of transformation. In Beat Till Stiff, Peta shares lessons learnt in her pilgrimage through life, such as how she stopped strangling her mother, why redheads have more fun, and whether having an orgasm really makes a difference to sex, procreation or world peace. In her bestselling guide to womanhood Can We Help it if We're Fabulous?, Peta shared with us her thoughts on being a woman. In Just in Time to be Too Late, she turned her attention to what it means to be a man in the twenty-first century. Now, in Beat Till Stiff, Peta covers topics she considers important, naughty or personal, all with a bent towards life's many transformations. Some of the essays in Beat Till Stiff are scurrilous, many are funny and others autobiographical, but all are thoroughly entertaining.

In "The Black List," 22 prominent African Americans offer their own stories and insights on the struggles, triumphs, and joys of black life in America. This book was created in conjunction with the film of the same name, which will air on HBO in fall 2008. 20 full-color photographs.

Amidst discontent over diversity, racial identity is a lens through which many US white Americans now view the political world.

What is home? The answer seems obvious. But Telling Our Stories of Home, an international collection of eleven plays by and about women from Lebanon, Haiti, Venezuela, Uganda, Palestine, Brazil, India, UK, and the US, complicates the answer. The "answer" includes stories as far-ranging as: enslaved women trying to create a home, one by any means necessary, and one in the ocean; siblings wrestling with their differing devotion to home after their mother's death; a family wrestling with the government's refusal to allow the burial of their soldier-son in their hometown; a young scholar attempting to feel at home after studying abroad; a young man fleeing home due to his sexual orientation only to discover the difficulty of creating home elsewhere, and Siddis (Indians of African descent) continuing to struggle for acceptance despite having lived in India for over 600 years. These are voices seldom represented to a larger audience. The plays and performance pieces range from 20 to 90-minute pieces and include a mix of monologue, duologue, and ensemble plays. Short yet powerful, they allow fantastic performance opportunities particularly in an age of social-distancing with flexible casts that together invite the theme of home to be performed and studied on the page. The plays include: The House by Arzé Khodr (Lebanon), Happy by Kia Corthron (US), The Blue of the Island by Évelyne Trouillot (Haiti), Nine Lives by Zodwa Nyoni (UK), Leaving, but Can't Let Go by Lupe Gehrenbeck (Venezuela), Questions of Home by Doreen Baingana (Uganda), On the Last Day of Spring by Fidaa Zidan (Palestine) Letting Go and Moving On by Louella Dizon San Juan (US), Antimemories of an Interrupted Trip by Aldri Anunciação (Brazil), So Goes We by Jacqueline E. Lawton (US), and Those Who Live Here, Those Who Live There by Geeta P. Siddi and Girija P. Siddi (India)