Showing results by narrator "Brad Sanders" in All Categories

In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration commissioned an oral history of the remaining former slaves. Bullwhip Days is a remarkable compendium of selections from these extraordinary interviews, providing an unflinching portrait of the world of government-sanctioned slavery of Africans in America. Here are 29 full narrations, as well as nine sections of excerpts related to particular aspects of slave life, from religion to plantation life to the Reconstruction era.

A no-holds-barred memoir of legendary Dead Kennedys and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer D.H. Peligro, Dreadnaught chronicles Peligro from his pre-DK years growing up in a deprived St. Louis ghetto to his years in San Francisco with Jello Biafra, East Bay Ray, and Klaus Flouride - from Los Angeles with the Red Hot Chili Peppers through years of drug and alcohol abuse all over the world amidst a backdrop of some of the most defining periods of late 20th century cultural, social, and music history.

After a botched holdup, Bill, a not-too-bright bungler who has been living with his dead mother in order to collect her social security checks, hides out in a traveling freak show populated by a bizarre assortment of bearded ladies, hermaphrodites, dogmen, and a mysterious frozen man.

Thirteen-year-old Stanley Mitchel Jr. spends most of his time helping his family run the town's drive-in movie theater, reading ten-cent comics, and playing with his dog Nub. Life in East Texas circa 1958 is not very exciting until Stanley discovers a stash of crumbling old love letters in a pile of burnt rubble behind the drive-in. As Stanley reads through the letters, he finds himself in the middle of a town mystery and discovering the secrets of his sleepy town.

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of black workers’ contribution to the American labor movement.

The Intersection of Racism & Redemption powerfully reaffirms the truth of forgiveness and reconciliation as a means of restoring us to one another, because racism, after all, is a matter of the heart. In the face of so much injustice being perpetuated upon Americans of all colors in our land today, this story will inspire listeners to fight for justice and expand its reach to all people in our country—not only people of color.

This book allows you to ride along with this transit bus operator as he shares his riveting 20 years' public service career while enduring several obstacles through sickness and good health. Too many times, a person will turn to alcohol or drugs for self-medication relief when encountering such dark times.

Striking in their emotional immediacy, the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self are based in a world where inequality is reality but where the insecurities of adolescence and young adulthood, and the tensions within family and the community, are sometimes the biggest complicating forces in one's sense of identity and the choices one makes.

Home is, in effect, the ideological autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. The two dozen essays that constitute this book were written during a five-year span - a turbulent and critical period for African Americans and Whites. The Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, Robert Williams’s Monroe Defense movement, the Harlem riots, the assassination of Malcolm X...each changed the way Jones/Baraka looked at America. This progressive change is recorded with honesty, anger, and passion in his writings.

A blues singer, Boratin, attempts suicide by jumping off the Bosphorus Bridge, but opens his eyes in the hospital. He has lost his memory, and can't recall why he wished to end his life. He remembers only things that are unrelated to himself, but confuses their timing. He knows that the Ottoman Empire fell, and that the last sultan died, but has no idea when. His mind falters when remembering civilizations, while life, like a labyrinth, leads him down different paths.

Ed Nelson is struggling to recover from the devastating loss of his wife to cancer. As Ed’s depression begins to deepen, his older brother steps in to help him make the critical changes necessary to bring him back from the brink. Into this new environment walks Tanya, a woman half his age, who immediately reminds him of his late wife.

Some of North Carolina's finest fiction and nonfiction writers come together in Every True Pleasure, including David Sedaris, Kelly Link, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, and more. Within the volume - featuring writers who identify as gay, trans, bisexual, and straight - are stories and essays that view the full spectrum of contemporary life though an LGBTQ lens. These writers, all native or connected to North Carolina, show the multifaceted challenges and joys of LGBTQ life, including young love and gay panic, the minefield of religion, military service, and more.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a cautious 19-year-old rookie preacher when he left Atlanta, Georgia, to attend seminary up north. Immediately at Crozer Theological Seminary, King, or "ML" back then, found that he was surrounded by a white staff and white professors. Even his dorm room had once been used by wounded Confederate soldiers. His fellow seminarians were almost all older; soldiers who'd fought in World War II, pacifists who'd chosen to resist fighting.

Tim's a struggling black kid on the mean streets of Newark. How far can he run? Where can he hide? What is innocence? Where does it go? Tim doesn't read as well as his classmates in an inner-city Newark high school. He's got good street creds, though, riffing strange rap-rhymes and running like the wind. He's packed into a three-flat with his mother, sister, and Uncle Gentrale. His father, a drunk, recently walked out on the family, wanting some "freedom". He says, "Ahgottahandleonit, son". He doesn't. Nor does Tim.

In September 1971, the bloodiest prison riot in American history took place in sleepy upstate New York town of Attica. Yet most of that blood was spilled not by the inmates who took over Attica Correctional Facility during four desperate days, but by the state's governor and future vice president Nelson Rockefeller. This is the personal story of what those days were like, what went wrong, and how the tragedy at Attica holds up a mirror to America's dark treatment of its prison population.

By winning the state high school basketball championship in 1955, ten teens from an Indianapolis school meant to be the centerpiece of racially segregated education in the state shattered the myth of their inferiority. Their brilliant coach had fashioned an unbeatable team from a group of boys born in the South and raised in poverty. Anchored by the astonishing Oscar Robertson, a future college and NBA star, the Crispus Attucks Tigers went down in history as the first state champions from Indianapolis and the first all-black team in U.S. history to win a racially open championship tournament.

As a black child growing up in 1920s Colorado, Frank Macon was often told that he would never amount to anything. His severe dyslexia didn’t help, nor did his tendency for mischief. But in spite of all that, Frank rose to heights beyond anyone’s imagining. Ever since childhood—when he jumped off a roof wearing homemade wings—he wanted to be a pilot. In this inspiring memoir, Frank tells his story of achieving that dream.