Showing results by narrator "J.D. Jackson" in All Categories

It's 1996, and in Houston a mayoral election is looming. As usual the campaign focuses on Pleasantville. Axel Hathorne, former chief of police, was all set to become Houston's first black mayor. But his lead is slipping thanks to Sandy Wolcott, a defence lawyer. And then, just as the competition intensifies, a girl goes missing, apparently while canvassing for Axel. And when her body is found, Axel's nephew is charged with her murder.

In the summer of 2014, Tim Howard became an overnight sensation after more than 10 years as one of America's leading professional soccer players. His record-breaking 15 saves for the United States national team against Belgium in the World Cup electrified a nation that had only recently woken up to the Beautiful Game after decades of hibernation. In this inspiring and candid memoir, the beloved US and Everton goalkeeper finally allows himself to do something that he would never do on the field: He drops his guard.

Emmitt Smith, the NFL’s all-time leading rusher of the Dallas Cowboys, Dancing with the Stars champion, and successful real-estate investor, outlines the principles that helped him become a winner on and off the football field.

The Drift is a fast-paced trip through the lurid world of modern hobos. Charles Harmon had a firm grip on the American dream until his mind started to crack. Now he's a know-it-all tramp riding the rails. When a friend asks Charles to help find his missing niece, the trail leads to an unsavory world of drug running and white supremacy.

Nine-year-old "Skid" Beaumont's family is stuck in the Louisiana swamps. His father’s vision of New Orleans spreading out into the swamps during the oil boom has brought them there, but the constructions stop short, the dream fizzles out, and the Beaumonts find themselves sinking in a soggy corner of 1980s America. This is the story of Skid’s family, his black mother and white father and his 3 brothers.

Born into “the blessings of liberty in a free State,” Solomon Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Bayou Boeuf region of Louisiana’s Red River Valley. Twelve Years a Slave is the chronicle of his captivity at the mercy of sadistic plantation owner Edwin Epps, who tested Northup’s tenacity and self-control under the most brutal conditions. Until fate brought a Canadian abolitionist to Epps’s farm, Northup thought he would never draw another free breath.

Cow Tom, born into slavery in Alabama in 1810 and sold to a Creek Indian chief before his 10th birthday, possessed an extraordinary gift: the ability to master languages. As the new country developed westward, and Indians, settlers, and blacks came into constant contact, Cow Tom became a key translator for his Creek master and was hired out to US military generals.

In the first full biography of actor Sidney Poitier, Aram Goudsouzian analyzes the life and career of a Hollywood legend, from his childhood in the Bahamas to his 2002 Oscar for lifetime achievement. Poitier is a gifted actor, a great American success story, an intriguing personality, and a political symbol; his life and career illuminate America's racial history.

Tim Scott, an African-American US senator, and Trey Gowdy, a white US congressman, won’t allow racial lines to divide them. They work together, eat meals together, campaign together, and make decisions together. Yet in the fall of 2010 - as two brand-new members of the US House of Representatives - they did not even know each other. Their story as politicians and friends began the moment they met and is a model for others seeking true reconciliation.

The city of Austin, Texas, "is fearfully dull", wrote young Will Porter to a friend in the spring of 1885, "except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively in the dead of night." Years later Will Porter would become the most famous writer in America - O. Henry, the toast of New York. The long-ago Austin servant girl murders would remain unsolved. But behind the O. Henry pen name, Will Porter was a man with secrets.

In 1831, the American ship Comet, carrying 165 enslaved men, women, and children, crashed onto a coral reef near the shore of the Bahamas, then part of the British Empire. Shortly afterward, the Vice Admiralty Court in Nassau set the rescued captives free. In a work of profoundly relevant research and storytelling, historian and Frederick Douglass Prize–winner Jeff Forret uncovers how the Comet incident—as well as similar episodes that unfolded over the next decade—resulted in the British Crown making reparations payments to a U.S. government that strenuously represented slaveholder interests.

Diana Wolf likes to think she has it all: a rock-god husband, an empty nest, a wine cellar, and a dream home in the woods. Life is good. It has to be. But when she hires a cartographer, Kerry Perkins, to survey and map her estate in rural Tennessee, she pulls back a frayed corner of the lie that is her fairytale life. On his first night at Wolf Hollow, Kerry stumbles across a young girl's skeleton buried in the woods. But what really scares Diana is a familiar symbol carved into the girl’s skull: two wolves.

We are here at home now, watching the world through our windows. Outside we see the city we know, but not as we’ve seen it before. The once hustling and bustling streets are empty—well, almost empty. Around the city there are still some people out and about. These are the people keeping us safe, keeping us healthy, keeping our mail and our food delivered, keeping our grocery stores stocked, keeping the whole city going.

Imagine a world devoid of violence - a world where fists can’t hit, guns don’t kill, and bombs can’t destroy. In this tantalizing novel of possibility, this has - suddenly and inexplicably - become our new reality. The US president must find a new way to wage war. The pope ponders whether the Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is still relevant.

Langston Brown is running out of time and options for clearing his name and escaping death row. Wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Mother's Day Massacre, he prepares to face his death. His final hope for salvation lies with his daughter, Liza, an artist who dreamed of a life of music and song but left the prestigious Juilliard School to pursue a law degree with the intention of clearing her father's name.

This anthology edited by the American writer, philosopher, and patron of the arts Alain Locke brings together some of the most influential pieces of African American works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Featuring the voices of Zora Neale Thurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes, Locke included commentary on the emergence of the New Negro Movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance. The New Negro is considered to be the definitive text on the movement.

The last scion of a once-powerful political family, Worcester mayor John O'Toole has his sights set on vastly higher aspirations. When night-shift paramedic Thomas Archer uncovers a secret that could upend the mayor's career, O'Toole is set on silencing him and sends Eamon Conroy, a brutal former cop, to ensure the truth remains under wraps.

Prayer changes everything. Yet so many things get in the way of communicating with our powerful and loving Creator: distraction, hardship, doubt, anger, busyness, unforgiveness, and more. In 10 Prayer Secrets, Hakeem Collins reveals 10 keys to life-changing results that come through the art of prayer.

This is the inspiring story of an African American whose athletic and entrepreneurial achievements - from being the first Black quarterback and head coach in the National Football League to founding one of the first all-Black investment securities companies - were equaled by his courage in confronting racial barriers.

In the near future, climate change has hit hard; unemployment is high, and controversial longevity treatments are only available to the very rich. Enter DC Police Detective Jen B. Lu and her partner, Chandler, a SIM implant in her brain providing an instant link to the internet and police records. As a detective in the Elder Abuse Unit, Jen is supposed to be investigating kids pushing their aging parents to exit so that they’re eligible to get the longevity drug. But what really has her attention are the persistent rumors about Eden, a black-market version of the longevity drug.