2014 Reprint of 1924 Edition..Rogers' work was concerned with «the Great Black Man» theory of history. This theory presented history, specifically black history, as a mural of achievements by prominent black people. Rogers devoted a significant amount of his professional life to unearthing facts about people of African ancestry. He intended these findings to be a refutation of contemporary racist beliefs about the inferiority of blacks. Books such as «100 Amazing Facts about the Negro,» «Sex and Race,» and «World's Great Men of Color,» all described remarkable black people throughout the ages and cited significant achievements of black people. Rogers' first book, «From „Superman“ to Man,» self-published in 1917, attacked notions of African inferiority. It is a polemic against the ignorance that fuels racism. The central plot revolves around a debate between a Pullman porter and a white racist Southern politician. Rogers used this debate to air many of his personal philosophies and to debunk stereotypes about black people and white racial superiority. The porter's arguments and theories are pulled from a plethora of sources, classical and contemporary, and run the gamut from history and anthropology to biology. Many of the ideas that permeated Rogers' later work can be seen germinating in «From „Superman“ to Man.» Rogers addresses issues such as the lack of scientific support for the idea of race, the lack of black history being told from a black person's perspective, and the fact of intermarriage and unions among peoples throughout history.
'I loved Fear of Dying. I found it irreverent, funny, tender and very wise and it made me feel more alive' RACHEL JOYCE, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Vanessa Wonderman is smart, sexy – and sixty. After a lifetime of crazy families, New York high society and playing a soap opera archvillain bitch, she's not ready to give up yet. But life's not so carefree any more. Her parents are dying, her husband's in hospital and her wild-child daughter is pregnant.
So when she signs up to a casual encounters site, she's thinking of leaving her wifelife behind – at least for a little bit. However, the most painful parts of your past always have away of surprising you. Will she learn in time how to live, how to love, how to be fearless?
Whatever your ailment, the nation's best-loved film experts have the perfect cinematic prescription for you, whether it's a course of the Coens or a dose of Die Hard. And they're ready to cure the movies to,, taking their scalpels to bloated blockbusters and warning of the ill effects of overpraise.
Where medical ignorance and movie expertise meet – the surgery of Doctors Kermode and Mayo is now open.
'Vivid, amusing and immensely enjoyable . . . A triumph' Alexander McCall Smith
Meet Tannie Maria: the loveable writer of recipes in her local paper, the Klein Karoo Gazette.
One Sunday morning, as Maria stirs apricot jam, she hears her editor Harriet on the stoep. What Maria doesn't realise is that Harriet is about to deliver a whole basketful of challenges and the first ingredient in two new recipes – recipes for love and murder.
A delicious blend of intrigue, milk tart and friendship, join Tannie Maria in her first investigation. Consider your appetite whetted for a whole new series of mysteries . . .
An elderly schoolteacher recalls the single act of youthful passion that changed her life forever. A young gardener has an unsettling encounter with a suburban housewife. A teenage girl strikes up an unlikely friendship with a lonely bachelor.
In these twelve haunting stories award-winning writer Mary Costello examines the passions and perils of everyday life with startling insight, casting a light into the darkest corners of the human heart.
A Change is Gonna Come chronicles more than forty years of black music: from the hopeful, angry refrains of the Freedom movement to the slick pop of Motown; from Woodstock and the 'Summer of Love' to Vietnam and the race riots; from disco inferno to the Million Man March. This is an insightful and riveting study which looks at the place black music occupies in social history, its battle for the desegregation of popular music and its contribution to social change outside the recording studio
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'Utterly wonderful' NINA STIBBE, author of Love, Nina
Twenty hours have gone since I last wrote. I have been thinking of you. I shall think of you until I post this, and until you get it. Can you feel, as you read these words, that I am thinking of you now; aglow, alive, alert at the thought that you are in the same world, and by some strange chance loving me.
In September 1943, Chris Barker was serving as a signalman in North Africa when he decided to brighten the long days of war by writing to old friends. One of these was Bessie Moore, a former work colleague. The unexpected warmth of Bessie's reply changed their lives forever. Crossing continents and years, their funny, affectionate and intensely personal letters are a remarkable portrait of a love played out against the backdrop of the Second World War. Above all, their story is a stirring example of the power of letters to transform ordinary lives.
AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME
WINNER OF THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2014
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2014
She stood on the edge of the grass. She hovered between worlds, deciphering the ground, tracing in mid-air the hall, the dining-room, the stairs. She was despairingly close to home now, to the rooms and the voices that contained the first names for home. Memories abounded and her heart pounded and history broke in . . .
Growing up in the west of Ireland in the 1940s Tess is a shy introverted child. But beneath her quiet exterior lies a heart of fire. A fire that will later drive her to make her home among the hurly burly of 1960s New York.
Over four decades and a life lived with quiet intensity on Academy Street in upper Manhattan, Tess encounters ferocious love and calamitous loss. But what endures is her bravery and fortitude, and her striking insights even as she is 'floating close to hazard.'
Joyous and heart-breaking, restrained but sweeping, this is a profoundly moving story that charts one woman's quest for belonging amid the dazzle and tumult of America's greatest city. Academy Street establishes Mary Costello as one of Ireland's most exciting literary voices.
Jesse and Lee share a house owned by a very nice Chinese dentist, where it rains in the hall. They move to cabins on the cliffs at Big Sur where the deafening croaks of frogs can be temporarily silenced by the cry, 'Campbell's Soup'. Ultimately, we learn how the frogs are permanently silenced . . . and dreams disperse around a fire into 186,000 endings per second. In anticipating flower power and the ideals of the Sixties, Brautigan's debut novel was at least at decade before its time and remains a weird and brilliant classic.