5 results for "Science"

The jazzmen: how Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie transformed America

Tye, Larry
"This is the story of three revolutionary American musicians, the maestro jazzmen who orchestrated the chords that throb at the soul of twentieth-century America. Duke Ellington [...], Louis Daniel Armstrong [...], William James Basie [...]. What is far less known about these groundbreakers is that they were bound not just by their music or even the discrimination that they, like nearly all Black performers of their day, routinely encountered. Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries by opening America's eyes and souls to the magnificence of their music. In the process they wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights movement. Based on more than 250 interviews, this exhaustively researched book brings alive the history of Black America in the early- to mid-1900s through the singular lens of the country's most gifted, engaging, and enduring African American musicians." -Från bokens baksida.
Mariner Books 2025-05-13 393 pages

I didn't come here to lie: my life and education

Lewis, Karen,Todd-Breland, Elizabeth
"An intimate, inspiring memoir by educator and labor union leader Karen Lewis, a formidable fighter, a staunch defender of teachers and students, and a beloved Chicagoan. In 2012, Karen Lewis led the Chicago Teachers Union to a historic strike, challenging the city's powerful mayor and paving the way for an unprecedented wave of teacher strikes in the decade that followed. But Lewis's life took her in rich and surprising directions long before she landed in the CTU President's office. I Didn't Come Here to Lie, written in collaboration with historian and education expert Elizabeth Todd-Breland, tells Lewis's story in full for the first time, capturing her lively wit, her charisma, and her commitment to building the schools and communities teachers, students, and families deserve. From her childhood on Chicago's South Side to her teen years organizing Black Power walkouts, from her education at Mount Holyoke and Dartmouth to her years in Oklahoma and Barbados and her stints in medical school and film school, readers follow Lewis through a life full of exploration. Wherever she was, she maintained a strong commitment to building fairness. She found her calling in the classroom, teaching science for more than twenty years before becoming a union leader in Chicago. Up until her untimely death from brain cancer in 2021, Karen Lewis was spirited, unshakeable, and fierce. She remains a model for current organizers and teachers doing the day-to-day work of building a better world. I Didn't Come Here to Lie is a testament to one of the true revolutionaries of her generation"--
Haymarket Books 2025-02-04 272 pages

Thereafter Johnnie

Carolivia Herron
Family trauma, race, and the destiny of a nation corrupted by slavery, cast in the light of epic myth: "More than a saga of Black revitalization . . . Part vision, part parable, it is a story for all America." ( The New York Times Book Review ) The Snowdon family stands as a pinnacle of Black excellence in Washington, D.C.: educated, affluent, and influential. John Christopher, the patriarch, saves lives as a heart surgeon and is revered by his students at Howard University. His wife, Camille, governs an elegant house overlooking Rock Creek Park and devotes herself to reading, gardening, and raising their three daughters--Cynthia, Patricia, and Eva--to attend the very best schools and roam the world on a whim. Theirs ought to be a story of success and empowerment, but something is rotten in the house of Snowdon. Years later, when John Christopher's granddaughter Johnnie comes to seek the truth about her own parentage, she unveils a legacy of unspeakable family secrets tangled up in America's original sin. What begins as a quest for identity spirals into an apocalyptic vision of a nation on the brink of ruin. By turns a poetic epic, a ghost story, a historical saga, and a chilling dystopian fable, Thereafter Johnnie is a unique and uniquely American fusion of myth and hard-bitten reality: an erotic, horrifying, and even hopeful reckoning with centuries of injustice.
McNally Jackson Books 2025-09-30 256 pages