Showing results by narrator "J.D Jackson" in All Categories

Computer whiz Teddy and his family are sent reeling after his little sister Tina is killed in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting. Teddy wants revenge and begins planning how to get it: luckily the police interrupt his scheme before he can act. Now he's been placed into the capable hands of Mariana Diaz, the tough probation officer who just might save him from himself.

Andre Anderson is a Black teenager with a dream. Although he loves to play basketball and laugh with his friends, he also loves to write and wants to make his mark on the world. One summer when he is assigned to do a magazine article about race, he creates a passionate and explosive piece. Soon, he is the target of racists who brutally attack him, putting him in the hospital. With his hand and dream broken, he must figure out how to put his life back together in spite of the anger and injustice he now sees around him.

On a hot day in July 1919, five black youths went swimming in Lake Michigan, unintentionally floating close to the white beach. An angry white man began throwing stones at the boys, striking and killing one. Racial conflict on the beach erupted into days of urban violence that shook the city of Chicago to its foundations. This mesmerizing narrative draws on contemporary accounts as it traces the roots of the explosion that had been building for decades in race relations, politics, business, and clashes of culture.

Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or “the new Jim Crow.” Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended altogether?

Born a slave in 1776, Gabriel grows up capable and literate only to be taken from his mother and sent to the capital city as a blacksmith’s apprentice. There in the forge, a meeting point for many travelers and news bearers, his work awakens him to the sparks of resistance that are igniting into rebellion around the globe. When he is unable to both defend the love of his life and earn the money to buy her freedom, Gabriel makes a decision: freedom for just his own family would not be enough.

The city of Austin, Texas, "is fearfully dull", wrote young Will Porter to a friend in the spring of 1885, "except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively in the dead of night." Years later Will Porter would become the most famous writer in America - O. Henry, the toast of New York. The long-ago Austin servant girl murders would remain unsolved. But behind the O. Henry pen name, Will Porter was a man with secrets.

There are over three million Muslims living in the United States today. How can you effectively communicate the good news with such large theological differences? The Gospel for Muslims can help make sharing your faith easier than you think. Author Thabiti Anyabwile, who is himself a convert from Islam to Christianity, instructs you in ways to discuss the good news of Christ with your neighbors and friends. The Gospel for Muslims allows you to focus on the people rather than the religious system.

Emmitt Smith, the NFL’s all-time leading rusher of the Dallas Cowboys, Dancing with the Stars champion, and successful real-estate investor, outlines the principles that helped him become a winner on and off the football field.

Jimmy hasn't seen his father in nine years. But one day he comes back - on the run from the law. Together, the two of them travel across the country - where Jimmy's dad will find the man who can exonerate him of the crime for which he was convicted. Along the way, Jimmy discovers a lot about his father and himself - and that while things can't always be fixed, sometimes they can be understood and forgiven.

You know the Super Soaker. It's one of the top 20 toys of all time. And it was an accidental discovery that brought it into being. Trying to create a new cooling system for refrigerators and air conditioners, inventor Lonnie Johnson instead created the mechanics for the iconic toy. A love of rockets, robots, and inventions and a mind for creativity were present in Lonnie Johnson's early life.

As slaves relentlessly toiled in an unjust system in 19th-century Louisiana, they all counted down the days until Sunday, when, at least for half a day, they were briefly able to congregate in Congo Square in New Orleans. There, they were free to set up an open market, sing, dance, and play music. They were free to forget their cares, their struggles, and their oppression. This is a poetic, nonfiction story about this little-known piece of African-American history.

Two-time heavyweight champion of the world and record-busting businessman George Foreman has spent his career challenging prevailing conceptions of success and achievement. In this book, he’s stepping into the ring as a coach to teach entrepreneurs the knockout business secrets that lead to extraordinary levels of success. You’ll learn how to focus on smart growth, fearlessly seize opportunities, and build an organization of significance. Knockout Entrepreneur does this by showing what it means to truly live out a new way of doing business.

Blackboard best-selling author Bertice Berry delivers an entertaining cautionary tale. Everything hip-hop music producer "Freedom" Hudson touches turns to gold. But when he buys a haunted brownstone in Harlem, he gets an earful from a group of ghosts. One of the spirits, an African drummer whose life was destroyed by slavery, has a warning for Freedom: We've passed the drum to you - now use it to send the right message.

Pittsburgh, 1995. The son of a black father he’s never known and a white mother he sometimes wishes he didn’t, 22-year-old Bobby Saraceno is passing for white. Raised by his bigoted maternal grandfather, Bobby has hidden his truth from everyone, even his best friend and fellow comic-book geek, Aaron, who has just returned home from prison a hardened racist.

In 1831, the American ship Comet, carrying 165 enslaved men, women, and children, crashed onto a coral reef near the shore of the Bahamas, then part of the British Empire. Shortly afterward, the Vice Admiralty Court in Nassau set the rescued captives free. In a work of profoundly relevant research and storytelling, historian and Frederick Douglass Prize–winner Jeff Forret uncovers how the Comet incident—as well as similar episodes that unfolded over the next decade—resulted in the British Crown making reparations payments to a U.S. government that strenuously represented slaveholder interests.

Southern fables usually go the other way around. A white woman is killed or harmed in some way, real or imagined, and then, like the moon follows the sun, a black man ends up dead. But when it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules - a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger working the backwoods towns of Highway 59, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about his home state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.

Persistently unlucky with women, Mitchell is tired of dates that seem to go nowhere fast. He's just decided to become a player - replete with a swaggering style and cocky attitude. Now all the women he meets find him irresistible! Enter Nikki, a beautiful woman whose luck with the opposite sex has also been pretty bad. Will they hit it off?

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof, a young White man, attended the Wednesday evening Bible study at the predominantly Black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. An hour later, Roof pulled a concealed weapon and killed nine African Americans as they prayed, including Myra Thompson, the wife of Reverend Anthony Thompson. This audiobook is the account of Reverend Thompson's wife's murder, the grief he experienced, and the radical choice to forgive the killer. But beyond that, Reverend Thompson casts a compelling vision of the power of forgiveness to transform our lives.

Experience the height of the Jazz Age through the eyes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most notable authors in American literature. This collection includes: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby.

The last scion of a once-powerful political family, Worcester mayor John O'Toole has his sights set on vastly higher aspirations. When night-shift paramedic Thomas Archer uncovers a secret that could upend the mayor's career, O'Toole is set on silencing him and sends Eamon Conroy, a brutal former cop, to ensure the truth remains under wraps.