A searingly honest memoir of one young woman’s journey toward self-acceptance as she comes to see her body as a symbol of rebellion and hope and chooses to live her life unapologetically. Ever since she was little, Leah Vernon was told what to believe and how to act. There wasn’t any room for imperfection. Good Muslim girls listened more than they spoke. They didn’t have a missing father or a mother with a mental disability. They didn’t have fat bodies or grow up wishing they could be like the...
Strength for the Fight (Library of Religious Biography (Lrb))
by Gary Scott Smith
It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved - and now seriously teenaged - son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America is pulsing with the challenge of change, the civil rights movement is in full swing and that's where Maya Angelou wants to be, working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. In this final volume, Maya Angelou provides, with her customary wisdom, compassion and wit, a first-hand record of an extraordinarily exciting and tra...
The Life and Thought of Henry Odera Oruka (Bloomsbury Introductions to World Philosophies)
Henry Odera Oruka was one of the most influential figures in 20th-Century African philosophy. During the early years of the decolonization of African countries, as universities worked to redefine themselves, Odera drove changes to curricula and research. A tireless advocate for democracy and human rights in Africa, he repeatedly intervened in the political debates of his time. This is the first critical biography of both the man himself and African philosophy in the context of changing times, t...
De massa call me and tell me, "Woman, I's pay big money for you, and I's done dat 'cause I wants you to raise me chillum. I's put you to live with Rufus for dat purpose. Now, if you doesn't want whippin' at de stake, you do what I wants." I thinks 'bout Massa buyin' me off de block and savin' me from bein' separated from my folks, and 'bout bein' whipped at de stake. Dere it am. What am I to do? So asks Rose Williams of Bell County, Texas, whose long-ago forced cohabitation remains as bitter at...