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

Amid rising gang violence, the crack epidemic, and police brutality, a group of unlikely voices cut through the chaos of late 1980s Los Angeles: N.W.A. Led by a drug dealer, a glammed-up producer, and a high school kid, N.W.A. gave voice to disenfranchised African Americans across the country. And they quickly redefined pop culture across the world. Their names remain as popular as ever: Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube. Dre soon joined forces with Suge Knight to create the combustible Death Row Records.

Michael Jordan credits George Mumford with transforming his on-court leadership of the Bulls, helping Jordan lead the team to six NBA championships. Mumford also helped Kobe Bryant, Andrew Bynum, and Lamar Odom and countless other NBA players turn around their games. A widely respected public speaker and coach, Mumford is sharing his own story and the strategies that have made these athletes into stars in The Mindful Athlete: The Secret to Pure Performance.

Author and entrepreneur Dennis Kimbro combines best-selling author Napoleon Hill's law of success with his own vast knowledge of business, contemporary affairs, and the vibrant culture of black America to teach you the secrets to success used by scores of black Americans, including Spike Lee, Jesse Jackson, Dr. Selma Burke, Oprah Winfrey, and many others. The result is inspiring, practical, clearly written, and totally workable.

Number-one best-seller John Grisham returns with his most suspenseful thriller yet. Given the importance of what they do, and the controversies that often surround them, and the violent people they sometimes confront, it is remarkable that in the history of the USA only four active federal judges have been murdered. Judge Raymond Fawcett just became number five. I did not know Judge Fawcett, but I know who killed him, and why. I am a lawyer, and I am in prison. It's a long story.

Joe's body is failing him. In order to make his last weeks of life more palatable, he goes into full digital immersion. This new process will allow him to play in a virtual environment with a fake but healthy and strong virtual body. As soon as he steps into this new environment he meets his virtual assistant, an Evolving Intelligence (E.I.), who takes the form of someone close to him. But before Joe and Spooky can begin playing the game, they are both summoned to a reality where magic is real.

Someone found him in a laundry basket at the Quick Wash, wrapped in a towel, a few hours old and close to death. They called him "Baby Moses" when they shared his story on the ten o'clock news.

From creative inspiration to financial success to healthy living—you name it, somebody's shared the secret to understanding it. With the perfect self-help collection at hand, you can become your own life coach and the master of your own growth. This collection includes the works of Napoleon Hill, George Samuel Clason, James Allen, Kahlil Gibran, Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Benjamin Franklin, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Russell H. Conwell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Florence Scovel Shinn, Charles F. Haanel, Wallace D. Wattles, Orison Swett Marden, and more.

Southern fables usually go the other way around. A white woman is killed or harmed in some way, real or imagined, and then, like the moon follows the sun, a black man ends up dead. But when it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules - a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger working the backwoods towns of Highway 59, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about his home state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.

Author Ron Chepesiuk chronicles the little known history of organized crime in Harlem.

African American organized crime has had as significant an impact on its constituent community as Italian, Jewish, and Irish organized crime has had on theirs. Gangsters are every bit as colorful, intriguing, and powerful as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, and have a fascinating history in gambling, prostitution, and drug dealing. In the late 1800s, Harlem became a highly fashionable neighborhood.

There is powerful breakthrough awaiting people who pray desperate prayers. Using the prayer of Hannah as a model, Apostle John Eckhardt invites listeners to a life of prayer that consistently sees results. Through biblical teaching and practical application, this book takes listeners through the five key points of Hannah’s prayer that can help them remain steadfast in prayer.

Blade, Magik, Nico Minoru, and Ghost Rider have joined forces to form the Midnight Suns. Trained by the Caretaker at the Abbey, a gothic fortress in a pocket dimension, this brand-new team of supernatural heroes is the world's first line of defense against the demonic forces of the underworld. With a looming prophecy of magical upheaval that threatens to unleash apocalyptic danger, the Suns must learn to work together—and quickly. But they aren't the only ones paying attention to the disruption of mystical forces. 

When the struggle to save oil-soaked birds and restore blackened beaches left him feeling frustrated and helpless, John Francis decided to take a more fundamental and personal stand: He stopped using all forms of motorized transportation. Soon after embarking on this quest that would span two decades and two continents, the young man took a vow of silence that endured for 17 years.  

Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or “the new Jim Crow.” Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended altogether?

When East, a low-level lookout for a Los Angeles drug organisation, loses his watch house in a police raid, his boss recruits him for a very different job: a road trip - straight down the middle of white, rural America - to assassinate a judge in Wisconsin. Having no choice, East and a crew of untested boys - including his trigger-happy younger brother, Ty - leave the only home they've ever known in a nondescript blue van, with a roll of cash, a map and a gun they shouldn't have. Along the way, the country surprises East. 

Follow Wakanda’s high-tech king across the savannah, into the deepest jungles, and up snow-capped mountains in this prose adaptation of the landmark comics series by Don McGregor, Rich Buckler, and Billy Graham. This arc expands on the life and culture of the Wakandans, also introducing us to Panther’s historic enemies. See T’Challa channel the strength of his ancient bloodline to take out foes, including the breakout character Killmonger! 

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. 

This story was going to begin like all the best stories. With a school bus falling from the sky. But no one saw it happen. They were all too busy - Jason Reynolds conjures 10 tales (one per block) about what happens after the dismissal bell rings and brilliantly weaves them into one wickedly funny, piercingly poignant look at the detours we face on the walk home, and in life. 

Almost everything you know about Mickey Mouse is wrong: He wasn’t Disney’s first star; Steamboat Willie wasn’t his first movie; Mickey wasn’t a nice guy - and Walt Disney didn’t invent him. In 1928, two very different best friends invented Mickey Mouse. And the success tore them apart. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks’ friendship is a story of betrayal, love, war, money, power, tragedy, intrigue, humor, despair, and hope. You’ll love them both - when you don’t want to drop anvils on their heads.

Kelley unearths freedom dreams in this exciting history of renegade intellectuals and artists of the African diaspora in the 20th century. Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the 400-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow.

Loose Balls is, after all these years, the definitive and most widely respected history of the ABA. It's a wild ride through some of the wackiest, funniest, strangest times ever to hit pro sports -- told entirely through the (often incredible) words of those who played, wrote and connived their way through the league's nine seasons.