{"title":"Mark Whitaker","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the compelling works of Mark Whitaker. From insightful biographies to explorations of American culture and history, discover absorbing narratives crafted with depth and nuance. A must-read for inquisitive minds.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"running-for-their-lives-book-mark-whitaker-9780224082594","title":"Running For Their Lives","description":"In 1928 two extraordinary Englishmen competed in an unprecedented event - a transcontinental road race across America that required them to run an average of 40 miles for 80 consecutive days.   Despite being separated by class, education and age, Peter Gavuzzi and Arthur Newton became close friends and formed a successful business partnership as endurance athletes. 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Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson’s famed plays about noble, but doomed, working-class citizens. But this community once had an impact on American history that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem and Chicago. It published the most widely read black newspaper in the country, urging black voters to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party, and then rallying black support for World War II. It fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro Leagues and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Pittsburgh was the childhood home of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner; Hall of Fame slugger Josh Gibson—and August Wilson himself. Some of the most glittering figures of the era were changed forever by the time they spent in the city, from Joe Louis and Satchel Paige to Duke Ellington and Lena Horne.    Mark Whitaker’s Smoketown is a “rewarding trip to a forgotten special place and time” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). 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Saying It Loud takes you inside the dramatic events in this seminal year, from Stokely Carmichael's middle-of-the-night ouster of moderate icon John Lewis as a chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to Carmichael's impassioned cry of Black Power  during a protest march in rural Mississippi. From Julian Bond's humiliating and racist ouster from the Georgia state legislature because of his antiwar statements to Ronald Reagan's election as California governor riding a white backlash vote against Black Power and urban unrest. From the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, to the origins of Kwanzaa, the Black Arts Movement, and the first Black studies programs. From Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ill-fated campaign to take the civil rights movement north to Chicago to the wrenching ousting of the white members of SNCC. Deeply researched and widely reported, Saying It Loud offers brilliant portraits of the major characters in the yearlong drama and provides new details and insights from key players and journalists who covered the story. 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Whitaker takes readers on a rousing, revelatory journey--and offers a timely reminder that Black History is not all bleak.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49871853650193,"sku":"CIN1501122398G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50065355440401,"sku":"CIN1501122398VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50096532521233,"sku":"CIN1501122398A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1501122398.jpg?v=1750717727"},{"product_id":"my-long-trip-home-book-mark-whitaker-9781451627541","title":"My Long Trip Home","description":"In a dramatic, moving work of historical reporting and personal discovery, an award-winning journalist sets out to trace the story of what happened to his parents, a fascinating but star-crossed interracial couple, and arrives at a new understanding of the family dramas that shaped their lives—and his own.  In a dramatic, moving work of historical reporting and personal discovery, Mark Whitaker, award-winning journalist, sets out to trace the story of what happened to his parents, a fascinating but star-crossed interracial couple, and arrives at a new understanding of the family dramas that shaped their lives—and his own.   His father, “Syl” Whitaker, was the charismatic grandson of slaves who grew up the child of black undertakers from Pittsburgh and went on to become a groundbreaking scholar of Africa. His mother, Jeanne Theis, was a shy World War II refugee from France whose father, a Huguenot pastor, helped hide thousands of Jews from the Nazis and Vichy police. They met in the mid-1950s, when he was a college student and she was his professor, and they carried on a secret romance for more than a year before marrying and having two boys. 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Malcolm X has become as much of an American icon as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. But when he was murdered in 1965, he was still seen as a dangerous outsider. White America found him alienating, mainstream African Americans found him divisive, and even his admirers found him bravely radical. Although Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our own Black shining prince,” he never received the mainstream acceptance toward which he seemed to be striving in his final year. It is more in death than his life that Malcolm’s influence has blossomed and come to leave a deep imprint on the cultural landscape of America.    With impeccable research and original reporting, Mark Whitaker tells the story of Malcolm X’s far-reaching posthumous legacy. It stretches from founders of the Black Power Movement such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton to hip-hop pioneers such as Public Enemy and Tupac Shakur. Leaders of the Black Arts and Free Jazz movements from Amiri Baraka to Maya Angelou, August Wilson, and John Coltrane credited their political awakening to Malcolm, as did some of the most influential athletes of our time, from Muhammad Ali to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and beyond. Spike’s movie biopic and the Black Lives Matter movement reintroduced Malcolm to subsequent generations. Across the political spectrum, he has been cited as a formative influence by both Barack Obama—who venerated Malcolm’s “unadorned insistence on respect”—and Clarence Thomas, who was drawn to Malcolm’s messages of self-improvement and economic self-help.    In compelling new detail, Whitaker also retraces the long road to exoneration for two men wrongfully convicted of Malcolm’s murder, making The Afterlife of Malcolm X essential reading for anyone interested in true crime, American politics, culture, and history.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53264987390225,"sku":"NGR9781668033302","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53595507556625,"sku":"NLS9781668033302","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53656952439057,"sku":"NIN9781668033302","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781668033302.jpg?v=1774087052"},{"product_id":"smoketown-the-untold-story-of-the-other-great-black-renaissance-cd-9781538512098","title":"Smoketown","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eSmoketown \u003c\/i\u003ebrilliantly offers us a chance to see this other black renaissance and spend time with the many luminaries who sparked it...It's thanks to such a gifted storyteller as Whitaker that this forgotten chapter of American history can finally be told in all its vibrancy and glory.--\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe other great Renaissance of black culture, influence, and glamour burst forth joyfully in what may seem an unlikely place--Pittsburgh, PA--from the 1920s through the 1950s. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eToday black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson's famed plays about noble but doomed working-class strivers. 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