Bent Northrop Memorial Library

"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In Tremble for My Country, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings -- moments...

The story of Pecola Breedlove profiles an eleven-year-old Black girl growing up in an America that values blue-eyed blondes and the tragedy that results from her longing to be accepted.

A young boy rides the bus across town with his grandmother and learns to appreciate the beauty in everyday things.

A three-act play concerned with the tensions in a middle-class African American family living on Chicago's Southside in the 1950s.

It was a day when Max didn't feel like talking to anyone. He just sat on his front steps and watched the clouds gather in the sky. A strong breeze shook the tree in front of his house, and Max saw two heavy twigs fall to the ground. So begins this story of a young boy's introduction to the joys of making music. Max picks up the sticks and begins tapping out the rhythms of everything he sees and hears around him-the sound of pigeons startled into flight,...

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...

The adventures of Peter, a little boy in the city on a very snowy day. No book has captured the magic and sense of possibility of the first snowfall better than this book. With its universal appeal, the story has become a favorite with millions, as it reveals a child's wonder at a new world, and the hope of capturing and keeping that wonder forever. -- Publisher description.

"These twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays explore, up close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities, of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in New England today. The storytelling, and the mystery of Bernard's...

"In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The New York Times Magazine’s...

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his fatherb7sa figure he knows more as a myth than as a manb7shas been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odysseyb7sfirst to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration...