Mirror To America

Dense, heady memoir, the first in a projected four-volume set, tracks the years Zabor spent getting involved with a spiritual commune in the '70s and caring for his dying parents in the 1980s. PW starred review.

John Hope Franklin lived through America's most defining twentieth-century transformation, the dismantling of legally protected racial segregation. A renowned scholar, he has explored that transformation in its myriad aspects, notably in his 3.5-million-copy bestseller, From Slavery to Freedom. Born in 1915, he, like every other African American, could not help but participate: he was evicted from whites-only train cars, confined to segregated schools, threatened—once with lynching—and consistently subjected to racism's denigration of his humanity. Yet he managed to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard; become the first black historian to assume a full professorship at a white institution, Brooklyn College; and be appointed chair of the University of Chicago's history department and, later, John B. Duke Professor at Duke University. He has reshaped the way African American history is understood and taught and become one of the world's most celebrated historians, garnering over 130 honorary degrees. But Franklin's participation was much more fundamental than that. From his effort in 1934 to hand President Franklin Roosevelt a petition calling for action in response to the Cordie Cheek lynching, to his 1997 appointment by President Clinton to head the President's Initiative on Race, and continuing to the present, Franklin has influenced with determination and dignity the nation's racial conscience. Whether aiding Thurgood Marshall's preparation for arguing Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, marching to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, or testifying against Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, Franklin has pushed the national conversation on race toward humanity and equality, a life long effort that earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1995. Intimate, at times revelatory, Mirror to America chronicles Franklin's life and this nation's racial transformation in the twentieth century, and is a powerful reminder of the extent to which the problem of America remains the problem of color.

Takaki traces the economic and political history of Indians, African Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, and Jewish people in America, with considerable attention given to instances and consequences of racism. The narrative is laced with short quotations, cameos of personal experiences, and excerpts from folk music and literature. Well-known occurrences, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Trail of Tears, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Japanese internment are included. Students may be surprised by some of the revelations, but will recognize a constant thread of rampant racism. The author concludes with a summary of today's changing economic climate and offers Rodney King's challenge to all of us to try to get along. Readers will find this overview to be an accessible, cogent jumping-off place for American history and political science plus a guide to the myriad other sources identified in the notes.

Eric is not racist—or at least he thought he wasn’t. That would be tested on the night he went out to celebrate becoming partners with one of the most prestigious law firms in Mississippi. While out with his friends William and Sean, Eric has an encounter with a cabdriver. This leads to one of the most extraordinary events of his life. Follow Eric as he goes through decade after decade of American history with one exception: everything is exactly the same except that the skin tones are reversed. This will be one of the most talked-about books in a long time, along with an ending that will leave you in awe.

"In this book, Roberto Saba investigates how the antislavery struggle led Brazil and the United States to cooperate, and how this dynamic collaboration helped establish capitalism and free wage labor as the norm in the Western world. Drawing on overlooked writings from entrepreneurs, scientists, planters, Confederate refugees in Brazil, and journalists, Saba's extensive research reveals that while United States Southerners terrified Brazil with aggressive projects to perpetuate and expand slave labor, reform-minded Brazilians-including slaveholders looked to the American North as a powerful instrument of state- and nation-building. They welcomed advocates from the northern United States who helped them to spread labor-saving machinery, expand large-scale coffee production, advance technical education, diversify economic activities, develop urban centers, and expand transportation infrastructure. Saba shows that the binational collaboration of radical modernizers in the United States and Brazil transformed the political economy of both countries, consolidated wage labor as the dominant production system in the Western hemisphere, and laid the groundwork for the demise of Brazilian slavery and the expansion of American capitalism"--

Written by the candidate's late father Richard J. Kerry and updated with a foreword by John Kerry's biographer and an afterword by an Associate Editor at The New Republic, the book is a unique look at the political thought of John Kerry's key influence.

Stephen Fox explores the consistently cyclical nature of advertising from its beginning. A substantial new introduction updates this lively, anecdotal history of advertising into the mid-1990s. --Publisher.