Recommendations based on "The "Genius""

When Black Boy exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, it caused a sensation. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that "if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy." Opposing forces felt compelled to comment: addressing Congress, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi argued that the purpose of this book "was to plant seeds of hate and devilment in the minds of every American." From 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for "obscenity" and "instigating hatred between the races."This new edition of the once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as "black boy." Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi, with poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those about him; at six he was "a drunkard," hanging about taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo."Wright's eloquent account is at once a profound indictment and an unashamed confession -- a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering.HarperCollins is proud to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the book's publication with this special hardcover edition, which utilizes the restored text established by The Library of America and features a new foreword by Edward P. Jones, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World.

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath during an astonishing burst of activity between June and October of 1938. Throughout the time he was creating his greatest work, Steinbeck faithfully kept a journal revealing his arduous journey toward its completion.The journal, like the novel it chronicles, tells a tale of dramatic proportions—of dogged determination and inspiration, yet also of paranoia, self-doubt, and obstacles. It records in intimate detail the conception and genesis of The Grapes of Wrath and its huge though controversial success. It is a unique and penetrating portrait of an emblematic American writer creating an essential American masterpiece.

In an eloquent and candid memoir, Richard Wright records his struggle against self-pity, social injustice, and ingrained racism as he grew to manhood in the Jim Crow South. Reprint.

The men who served with in the 1st Infantry Division with F company, 52nd Infantry, (LRP) later redesignated as Company I, 75th Infantry (Ranger) --engaged in some of the fiercest, bloodiest fighting during the Vietnam War, suffering a greater relative aggregate of casualties that any other LRRP/LRP/ Ranger company. Their base was Lai Khe, within hailing distance of the Vietcong central headquarters, a mile inside Cambodia, with its vast stockpiles of weapons and thousands of transient VC and NVA soldiers. Recondo-qualified Bill Goshen was there, and has written the first account of these battle-hardened soldiers. As the eyes and ears of the Big Red One, the 1st Infantry, these hunter/killer teams of only six men instered deep inside enemy territory had to survive by their wits, or suffer the deadly consequences. Goshen himself barely escaped with his life in a virtual suicide mission that destroyed half his team. His gripping narrative recaptures the raw courage and sacrifice of American soldiers fighting a savage war of survival: men of all colors, from all walks of life, warriors bonded by triumph and tragedy, by life and death. They served proudly in Vietnam, and their stories need to be told.

For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes served to usefully intensify these conflicts. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing to a "blackening of America". Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading up to the Civil War. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, burlesque skits, and illustrations in tandem with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, Love and Theft argues that blackface minstrelsy both embodied and disrupted the racial tendencies of its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear - a dialectic of "love and theft" - the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it enabled the formation of a self-consciously white working class. Lott exposes minstrelsy as a signifier for multiple breaches: the rift between high and low cultures, the commodification of the dispossessed by the empowered, the attraction mixed with guilt of whites caught in the act of cultural thievery.

Rusty Travels Abroad To Fulfil His Dream Of Becoming A WriterRusty Goes To London Is The Fourth Book In Puffin'S New Series Of The Complete Escapades Of Rusty; This Is The First Time That All The Rusty Stories Are Available In Chronological Order. In His Early Twenties Now, Rusty Finally Severs Ties With Dehra And Books A Passage To England, With The Dream Of Writing And Selling His Novel Abroad. First In His Aunt'S House In Jersey, And Then In Rented Lodgings In London, He Works As A Clerk By Day And Writes Away In The Evenings. Eventually The Novel Is Finished And Rusty Even Finds A Publisher. But This, He Discovers, Does Not Mean That His Book Will See The Light Of Day Soon ...While In London, Rusty Has Myriad Adventures, Each More Incredible Than The Last. Strolling Down Baker Street, He Runs Into Sherlock Holmes, Who Gives Him A Few Lessons In Investigative Techniques. At The Victoria And Albert Museum, He Is Accosted By Rudyard Kipling. And Then, Of Course, There Is The Strange Incident At The Chinese Quarter, The Calypso Christmas In His Lodgings, And The Story Of The Vietnamese Girl Vu-Phuong. After Three Years Abroad, However, Rusty Realizes That He Wants To Make India His Permanent Home; All He Really Needs Is A Room Of His Own To Live And Write In, As The Vibrant World That He Has Known And Loved All Along Unfolds Outside. Returning To Dehra, He Renews Some Acquaintances And Makes A Few New Ones, And Settles Into His Role As Full-Time Author. Full Of Interesting Stories And Memorable Characters, Rusty Goes To London Is A Book That Will Delight All Of Ruskin Bond'S Young Fans.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Cain Mutiny delivers an "enormously entertaining" portrait of "a Bronx Tom Sawyer" ( San Francisco Chronicle). City Boy is Herman Wouk's sharp and moving novel of boyhood. A hilarious and often touching tale of an urban kid's adventures and misadventures on the street, in school, in the countryside, always in pursuit of Lucille, a heartless redhead personifying all the girls who torment and fascinate pubescent lads of eleven.

George MacDonald Fraser's famous Flashman series appearing for the first time in B-format with an exciting new series style, ready to please his legions of old fans and attract armies of new ones. The illustrious Flashy gets up to his old tricks in another installment of The Flashman Papers. 'Forward the Light Brigade' Was there a man dismayed? Indeed there was. As the British cavalry prepared to launch themselves against the Russian guns at Balaclava, Harry Flashman was not so much dismayed as terrified. But the Crimea was only the beginning: beyond lay snowbound wastes of the Great Russian slave-empire, torture and death from relentless enemies, headlong escapes, savage tribal hordes to the right of him, passionate and beautiful females to the left of him, and finally that unknown but desperate war on the roof of the world, when India was the mighty prize and there was nothing to stop the armed might of Imperial Russia but the wavering sabre and terrified ingenuity of old Flashy himself.

From the bestselling author Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG comes an autobiographical account of his exploits as a World War II pilot! Superb stories, daring deeds, fantastic adventures! Learn all about Roald Dahl's encounters with the enemy, his worldwide travels, the life-threatening injuries he sustained in a plane accident, and the rest of his sometimes bizarre, often unnerving, and always colorful adventures. Told with the same irresistible appeal that has made Roald Dahl one of the world's best-loved writers, Going Solo brings you directly into the action and into the mind of this fascinating man.

When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Forty years later, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs through It has established itself as a classic of the American West. This new edition will introduce a fresh audience to Maclean’s beautiful prose and understated emotional insights. Elegantly redesigned, A River Runs through It includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award-winning 1992 film adaptation of River. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.”