[PDF] An Ordinary White eBook

Author : Tracy K. Smith
Publisher : Knopf
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 37,95 MB
Release : 2015-03-31
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0307962660

GET BOOK

National Book Award Finalist From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her “extraordinary range and ambition” (The New York Times Book Review): a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God’s plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. In lucid, clear prose, Smith interrogates her childhood in suburban California, her first collision with independence at Harvard, and her Alabama-born parents’ recollections of their own youth in the Civil Rights era. These dizzying juxtapositions—of her family’s past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future—will in due course compel Tracy to act on her passions for love and “ecstatic possibility,” and her desire to become a writer. Shot through with exquisite lyricism, wry humor, and an acute awareness of the beauty of everyday life, Ordinary Light is a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family, one that skillfully combines a child’s and teenager’s perceptions with adult retrospection. Here is a universal story of being and becoming, a classic portrait of the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home.

Author : Brock Clarke
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 23,7 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Fiction
ISBN :

GET BOOK

The time has come for twenty-seven-year-old Lamar Kerry, Jr. to shed his "ordinariness" and come to his hometown's rescue.

Author : Condoleezza Rice
Publisher : Crown
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 50,7 MB
Release : 2011-10-11
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0307888479

GET BOOK

This is the story of Condoleezza Rice that has never been told, not that of an ultra-accomplished world leader, but of a little girl--and a young woman--trying to find her place in a sometimes hostile world, of two exceptional parents, and an extended family and community that made all the difference. Condoleezza Rice has excelled as a diplomat, political scientist, and concert pianist. Her achievements run the gamut from helping to oversee the collapse of communism in Europe and the decline of the Soviet Union, to working to protect the country in the aftermath of 9-11, to becoming only the second woman--and the first black woman ever--to serve as Secretary of State. But until she was 25 she never learned to swim, because when she was a little girl in Birmingham, Alabama, Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor decided he'd rather shut down the city's pools than give black citizens access. Throughout the 1950's, Birmingham's black middle class largely succeeded in insulating their children from the most corrosive effects of racism, providing multiple support systems to ensure the next generation would live better than the last. But by 1963, Birmingham had become an environment where blacks were expected to keep their head down and do what they were told--or face violent consequences. That spring two bombs exploded in Rice’s neighborhood amid a series of chilling Klu Klux Klan attacks. Months later, four young girls lost their lives in a particularly vicious bombing. So how was Rice able to achieve what she ultimately did? Her father, John, a minister and educator, instilled a love of sports and politics. Her mother, a teacher, developed Condoleezza’s passion for piano and exposed her to the fine arts. From both, Rice learned the value of faith in the face of hardship and the importance of giving back to the community. Her parents’ fierce unwillingness to set limits propelled her to the venerable halls of Stanford University, where she quickly rose through the ranks to become the university’s second-in-command. An expert in Soviet and Eastern European Affairs, she played a leading role in U.S. policy as the Iron Curtain fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated. Less than a decade later, at the apex of the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, she received the exciting news--just shortly before her father’s death--that she would go on to the White House as the first female National Security Advisor. As comfortable describing lighthearted family moments as she is recalling the poignancy of her mother’s cancer battle and the heady challenge of going toe-to-toe with Soviet leaders, Rice holds nothing back in this remarkably candid telling.

Author : Brock Clarke
Publisher :
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 21,60 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780151007332

GET BOOK

Lamar Kerry, Jr., is an unlikely hero. At twenty-seven years old he can't dance unless he's had more than a few drinks. His wardrobe is uninspired, at best. He has returned after college to Little Falls, his miserable, working-class hometown in upstate New York, deflating everyone's expectations of him in so doing. He's over-educated, overconfident, fundamentally bright, but mostly going nowhere. When the town's only Latino, Lamar's former high school classmate, goes missing and is feared dead, Lamar--done with being a disappointment to his father and his girlfriend--decides to break out of the ordinary by solving the case, the roots of which may be in the town's racist undercurrent. Will the ordinary white boy achieve the extraordinary in Little Falls? In a voice both tender and biting, Brock Clarke mingles subtle social criticism with laugh-out-loud funny observations, crafting in Lamar a character both unforgettable and universal, a character that will live long and proud in American literature.

Author : Philip H. Frankel
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 23,72 MB
Release : 2001-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780300091786

GET BOOK

"On 21 March 1960 police opened fire on members of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) protesting peacefully in the South African township of Sharpeville against apartheid's iniquitous 'pass laws'. Sixty-nine people died, many shot in the back. The shots fired that day in an obscure corner of South Africa reverberated around the world and Sharpeville became the symbol of the evil of the apartheid system." "This seminal event in the history of African nationalism has never been systematically documented. The Wessels Commission of Inquiry established to investigate the crisis never published a satisfactory final report. And in the four decades since the shooting the massacre has been so mythologised and contorted to serve various political interests as to preclude a thorough investigation."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author : Neil Roos
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 35,6 MB
Release : 2024-02-06
Category : History
ISBN : 0253068045

GET BOOK

How were whites implicated in and shaped by apartheid culture and society, and how did they contribute to it? In Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society, historian Neil Roos traces the lives of ordinary white people in South Africa during the apartheid years, beginning in 1948 when the National Party swept into power on the back of its catchall apartheid slogan. Drawing on his own family's story and others, Roos explores how working-class whites frequently defied particular aspects of the apartheid state but seldom opposed or even acknowledged the idea of racial supremacy, which lay at the heart of the apartheid society. This cognitive dissonance afforded them a way to simultaneously accommodate and oppose apartheid and allowed them to later claim they never supported the apartheid system. Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society offers a telling reminder that the politics and practice of race, in this case apartheid-era whiteness, derive not only from the top, but also from the bottom.