2024 Adult Black History Month (DEI) Booklist

February display

Showing 61 - 80 of 93  There are a total of 94 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Please don't sit on my bed in your outside clothes"
Star rating for Please don't sit on my bed in your outside clothes
Description:
New York Times bestselling author, comedian, actress, and producer Phoebe Robinson is back with a new essay collection that is equal parts thoughtful, hilarious, and sharp about human connection, race, hair, travel, dating, Black excellence, and more. Written in Phoebe's unforgettable voice and with her unparalleled wit, Robinson's latest collection, laced with spot-on pop culture references, takes on a wide range of topics. From the values she learned...
Book cover for "A promised land"
Star rating for A promised land
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
In the first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to...
Book cover for "Punch me up to the gods"
Star rating for Punch me up to the gods
Description:
Brian Broome's early years were spent growing up in Ohio, a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys. He recounts his experiences—in all their cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory—revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help to soothe his hurt, young psyche, usually to uproarious and devastating effect. A no-nonsense mother and broken father play...
Book cover for "Red at the bone"
Star rating for Red at the bone
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
It is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's birthday celebration in her grandparent's Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, escorted by her father to the soundtrack of Prince, she wears a special, custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own sixteenth birthday party and a celebration which...
Book cover for "Red Island House"
Star rating for Red Island House
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
Shay is surprised when her husband Senna declares his intention to build her a spectacular dream house on an idyllic beach in the tropical island nation of Madagascar. But the Red Island House casts a spell from the moment she sees it, and before she knows it Shay has become the somewhat reluctant mistress of a sprawling household, caught between her privileged American upbringing and education, and her connection to the continent of her ancestors....
Book cover for "Riot baby"
Star rating for Riot baby
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Ella and Kev are brother and sister, both gifted with extraordinary power. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by structural racism and brutality. Their futures might alter the world. When Kev is incarcerated for the crime of being a young black man in America, Ella--through visits both mundane and supernatural--tries to show him the way to a revolution that could burn it all down"--
Book cover for "The rise"
Star rating for The rise
Description:
Black cooks and creators have led American culture forward with indelible contributions of artistry and ingenuity from the start, but Black authorship has been consistently erased from the story of American food. Now, chef, author, and television star Marcus Samuelsson gathers together an unforgettable feast of food, culture, and history to highlight the diverse deliciousness of Black cooking today. Driven by a desire to fight against bias, reclaim...
Book cover for "Salvage the bones"
Star rating for Salvage the bones
Author:
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.
Book cover for "Seven days in June"
Star rating for Seven days in June
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"Brooklynite Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer, who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning literary author who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York. When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and...
Book cover for "Stories from the tenants downstairs"
Star rating for Stories from the tenants downstairs
Description:
Eight interconnected stories follow the tenants in the Banneker Homes, a low-income high rise in Harlem where gentrification weighs on everyone's mind, as they weave in and out of each other's lives, endeavoring to escape from their pasts and forge new paths forward.
Book cover for "The street"
Star rating for The street
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies"--
Book cover for "Such a fun age"
Star rating for Such a fun age
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small...
Book cover for "The survivalists"
Star rating for The survivalists
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"In the wake of her parents' death, Aretha, a habitually single Black lawyer, has had only one obsession in life--success--until she falls for Aaron, a coffee entrepreneur. Moving into his Brooklyn brownstone to live along with his Hurricane Sandy-traumatized, illegal-gun-stockpiling, optimized-soy-protein-eating, bunker-building roommates, Aretha finds that her dreams of making partner are slipping away, replaced by an underground world, one of selling...
Book cover for "The sweetness of water"
Star rating for The sweetness of water
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother,...
Book cover for "Take my hand"
Star rating for Take my hand
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
"Montgomery, Alabama, 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend has big plans to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she intends to help women make their own choices for their lives and bodies. But when her first week on the job takes her down a dusty country road to a worn-down one-room cabin, she's shocked to learn that her new patients, India and Erica, are children--just...
Book cover for "Their eyes were watching God"
Star rating for Their eyes were watching God
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in Black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates boldly and brilliantly African-American culture and heritage....
Book cover for "Things fall apart"
Star rating for Things fall apart
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"Things Fall Apart tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around Okonkwo, a 'strong man' of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first of these stories traces Okonkwo's fall from grace with the tribal world in which he lives, and in its classical purity of line and economical beauty it provides us with a powerful fable about the immemorial conflict between the individual and society. The second story, which is as modern as the...
Book cover for "Things that make white people uncomfortable"
Star rating for Things that make white people uncomfortable
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:

This sports book, memoir, and manifesto from a Super Bowl Champion elucidates racism in the United States.
Michael Bennett is a Super Bowl Champion, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, a fearless activist, a feminist, a grassroots philanthropist, an organizer, and a change maker. He’s also one of the most scathingly humorous athletes on the planet, and he wants to make you uncomfortable.
Bennett adds his unmistakable voice

...
Book cover for "The truths we hold"
Star rating for The truths we hold
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"From one of America's most inspiring political leaders, a book about the core truths that unite us, and the long struggle to discern what those truths are and how best to act upon them, in her own life and across the life of our country. By reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, Kamala Harris offers in The Truths We Hold a...
Book cover for "Twelve years a slave"
Star rating for Twelve years a slave
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
Describes the life of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from Saratoga, N.Y., who was kidnapped in 1841 and forced into slavery in Louisiana for twelve years.