Showing results by narrator "Kevin Kenerly" in All Categories

On February 22, 1855, the Elizabeth Jennings v. Third Avenue Rail Road case was settled: The jury stunned the courtroom with a $250 verdict in Lizzie’s favor. Future president Chester A. Arthur was Jennings’ attorney, and their lives would be forever intertwined. This is the story of what happened that day. It’s also the story of Jennings and Arthur’s families, the struggle for equality, and race relations. It’s the history of America at its most despicable and exhilarating. Yet few historians know of Elizabeth Jennings or her impact on desegregating public transit.

Twenty-five years after his high school graduation, David Halpert returns to a place that most people flee. But David is making his own escape - from his divorce and the death of his son. In Detroit David learns about the double shooting of his high school girlfriend, Natalie, and her black half-brother, Dirk. As David becomes involved with Natalie’s sister, he will discover that both he and his hometown have reason to hope.

Politics from A to Z provides an up-to-date, thoroughly researched glossary of political topics spanning ancient Greece to contemporary America. Featuring an introductory interview with Noam Chomsky, Politics from A to Z is ideal for anyone interested in politics, from beginners to scholars. With detailed entries and useful timelines, Politics from A to Z introduces the influential figures and ideas that have shaped politics, from the American Revolution to Zionism.

R is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead. Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie, and she is the opposite of everything he knows - warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can't understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins.

Willie Black knew he had a father, even if he didn't know where he was buried. It wasn't like Artie Lee gave his son anything but his genes. He died when Willie was 15 months old, and Artie and Peggy never married. They couldn't have, in the segregated commonwealth of Virginia in 1960. Then, in January of 2018, Artie Lee, dead almost 57 years, reinserts himself into his son's life. Philomena Slade calls Willie, the mixed-race night-cops reporter for the local daily rag, to her death bed to ask him a favor he can't refuse: Keep Artie's grave clean.

Talking about race relations is never easy. Bruce A. Jacobs has written a book that shows us how we can begin - not with lofty abstractions or policy arguments, but with practicality and directness. Completely revised and updated, this is a candid assessment of, and guide to, improving race relations, a book Kirkus Reviews called "shocking" and Publishers Weekly termed "a frank, intelligent guide".

The Devil’s Stocking is the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low-purse fighters, cops, con artists, and bar girls. Chronicling a battle for truth and human dignity which gives way to a larger story of life and death decisions, literary grandmaster Nelson Algren’s last novel is a fitting capstone to a long and brilliant career.

Washington, embroiled in midterm elections, did not want to hear the truth about an unsettling series of murders. But when the newspapers reported a fourth killing, when they gave the killer a name and details of his horrendous crimes, few people could ignore it.

Having won his emancipation after fighting on the side of the colonies during the American Revolution, Salem Hawley is a free man. Only a handful of years after the end of British rule, Hawley finds himself drawn into a new war unlike anything he has ever seen. New York City is on the cusp of a new revolution as the science of medicine advances, but procuring bodies for study is still illegal. Bands of resurrectionists are stealing corpses from New York cemeteries, and women of the night are disappearing from the streets, only to meet grisly ends elsewhere.

Les Hacker doesn't seem to have an enemy in the world - other than whoever tried to kill him with a high-powered rifle while he was sitting on a park bench six floors below Willie Black's living room window. Les is the closest thing Willie has had to a father figure in a checkered life of drinking, divorces, and journalism. He certainly has better qualifications than any of the other men Willie's mother, Peggy, took in over the years. Of course, as Willie would say, that would only make him a tall midget.

Ken Goddard’s First Evidence series centers on what may prove to be evidence of extraterrestrial contact. In this third book, crime scene investigator Colin Cellars wakes up in the maw of an fMRI machine at a remote military hospital, having no memory of who he is or how he got there - but he quickly becomes aware that he is being hunted. His instinctive response is to run, and he must rely on his new, incredibly enhanced sense of music and tone to trigger fragments of memories that may help him discover who is friend, who is foe - and who is something else entirely.

A familiar name piques Willie Black’s interest on a slow news day: Scuffletown Park. He and the first of his four wives lived next to the pocket park when they were young and still on speaking terms. Now, Scuffletown is the site of a crime scene, one that doesn’t fit the usual modus operandi for Richmond. For one thing, there’s plenty of blood but no body. Also, it seems that a knife was involved - a rarity in Willie’s gun-happy city. And Scuffletown is in the heart of the Fan, where violence is a blessedly rare occurrence.

In this ambitious novel, Phillips creates a dazzling kaleidoscope of historical fiction, one that illuminates the dark legacy of Europe’s obsession with race and blood. At the center of The Nature of Blood is a young woman, a Nazi death camp survivor, devastated by the loss of everyone she loves. Her story is interwoven with a cast of characters from both the present and past: her uncle Stephan, Othello the Moorish general, three Jews in 15th century Venice, and an Ethiopian Jew struggling for acceptance in contemporary Israel.

The experience of the Vietnam War is almost impossible to grasp - the fear, smell, pain, and camaraderie. Boys were turned into men, men were transformed into soldiers, and then from soldiers to warriors. These warriors had wives who shared in their transformations. Some marriages were strengthened, while for others men and their families were left emotionally and spiritually battered. Focusing in on a singular company’s experience of war and its eventual homecoming, Andrew Wiest discusses the shared experience of combat and both the darkness and resiliency of war’s aftermath.

At 20, Tiger Woods made his debut in a Nike commercial. “Hello, World,” he said. “Are you ready for me?” The world was ready. His handlers kept a tight rein on the private superstar, carefully controlling his media coverage. Although everyone recognizes Tiger Woods, his true character has remained a mystery.

In the woods outside the town of Willnot, the remains of several people have suddenly been discovered, unnerving the community and unsettling Hale, the town's all-purpose general practitioner, surgeon, and conscience. At the same time, Bobby Lowndes - a man being followed by the FBI - mysteriously reappears in his hometown at Hale's door. Over the ensuing months, the daily dramas Hale faces as he tends to his town and to his partner, Richard, collide with the swerves and turns of life in Willnot.

Originally published in 1923 by Knopf, The Prophet is a teaching fable that has been cherished by millions for nearly 100 years. It is a book of wisdom that provides guidance on how to live a life imbued with meaning and purpose. Gibson explores all of life’s important issues - including love, marriage, the human condition, friendship, prayer, beauty, death, and much more. What makes this edition of The Prophet especially exciting is the inclusion of newly discovered Gibran material.

In this deeply personal book, Baldwin reflects on the experiences that shaped him as a writer and activist: from his childhood in Harlem to the deaths of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Exploring the visceral reality of life in the American South as well as Baldwin’s impressions of London, Paris and Hamburg, No Name in the Street grapples with the failed promises of global liberation movements in fearless, candid prose.

The summer of 1919 is now over, and on the high prairie, a small army of men, women, and machines moves across the land, harvesting the wheat. Custom threshers, steam engineers, bindle stiffs, cooks, camp followers, and hobos join the tide. Wheat is king as people gleefully embrace the gospels of bounty and progress. But with the wheat comes a serial killer who calls himself the Windmill Man and who believes he has a holy calling to water the newly plucked earth with blood.

Sergeant Major John Phillips lives two lives. In one, he teaches cadets at the United Entities Mechanized Warfare Academy how to pilot massive war machines. In the other, he is the Voice of the Fall, stealing government secrets and writing revolutionary doctrines for the Harbingers of the Fall, an organization bent on bringing down civilization so that humanity can rebuild from the ashes.