"At the age of 8, Reyna Grande made the dangerous and illegal trek across the border from Mexico to the United States, and discovered that the American Dream is much more complicated that it seemed."--Provided by publisher.

"An enduring story of one young man's coming of age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America." -- Ingram

In this memoir, we follow Séamas and the rest of his rowdy clan as they learn to cook, clean, do the laundry, and struggle--often hilariously--to keep the household running smoothly and turn into adults in the absence of the woman who had held them together.

She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s--and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the city's underworld, she was the only member of...

"Peter Bagge has defied the expectations of the comics industry by changing gears from his famous slacker hero Buddy Bradley to documenting the life and times of historical 20th century trailblazers. If Bagge had not already had a New York Times bestseller with his biography of Margaret Sanger, his newest biography, Fire!!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story, would seem to be an unfathomable pairing of author and subject. Yet through Bagge's skilled cartooning,...

"National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having...