Cultural Literature

What makes for a good life? The seven deadly vices and seven holy virtues, ingrained in our cultural imagination, help us answer this perennial question. For two millennia, these fourteen character traits have stirred our imagination of human nature and...

This first cultural biography of rap superstar and "master of storytelling" (The New Yorker) Kendrick Lamar explores his meteoric rise to fame and his profound impact on a racially fraught America--perfect for fans of Zack O'Malley Greenburg's Empire...

In late 1970, a mild-mannered Haverford College physics professor privately asked a few people this question: "What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?" In remarkable detail and with astonishing depth of research, Betty Medsger reveals the...

The powers-that-be in 1920s auto racing, namely the American Automobile Association's Contest Board, barred everyone who wasn't a white male from the sport. But Dewey Gatson, a black man who went by the name Rajo Jack, drove into the center of "outlaw"...

Description: Dr./Major Breathed chooses the cause of the Confederacy over medicine but will that decision cost him the love of his life? James is swept away into a war created by divisions between the northern and southern states. The Broken Circle has...

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... and the color black is one of the most beautiful colors Art historian, art collector, curator, and writer Charles Moore takes you on an exquisite journey through the world of the Black artists who revolutionized...

National Bestseller In this nuanced and complex portrait of Barack Obama, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Remnick offers a thorough, intricate, and riveting account of the unique experiences that shaped our nation's first African American president. Through...

A country warmly hospitable and surprisingly violent, physically beautiful, yet appallingly poor--these are the contrasts Joseph Page explores in The Brazilians, a monumental book on one of the most colorful and paradoxical places on earth.Once one of...

The inspiring true story of a remarkable coach whose superb undefeated high-school basketball team in 1980s Baltimore produced four NBA players and gave hope to a desperate neighborhood and city--"a feel-good story that is timely as well as true" (Glenn...

There has always been more to music in Boston than the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Jazz, for example, dates to the early 1900s, but it was in the 1940s and 1950s that it truly sparkled. The Boston Jazz Chronicles: Faces, Places, and Nightlife 1937-1962 is...

This stirring collection of Negro spirituals, edited by the great Negro poet James Weldon Johnson and arranged for voice and piano by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, presents 120 of these melodic -- and intensely moving -- religious folk songs for...

Nestled on the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, the city of Khartoum has, for two centuries, been a focal point for both imperialism and rebellion, a breeding ground for revolutionary fervor, begrudging target for international criticism, and a...

This book, The Book of It, is not the ultimate and single explanation of what its author has uncovered by years of reading, research, and listening to the words and teachings of others. The fact is that the only part of It that can be described by a...

"Rutherford describes [The Book of Humans] as being about the paradox of how our evolutionary journey turned 'an otherwise average ape' into one capable of creating complex tools, art, music, science, and engineering. It's an intriguing question, one his...

In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of the first acts since World War II to be legally defined as genocide. Two years later, Clea Koff, a twenty-three-year-old forensic anthropologist, left the safe confines of a lab in Berkeley, California, to serve as one of...

Hey, my name is Arie Leach, and I want to take you down a timeline. We are going on a journey from the late eighties into the nineties. This timeline is my perception of what happened to my family, friends, and me when the crack epidemic hit Baltimore...