Showing results by narrator "Karen Chilton" in All Categories

Once in a great while a book comes along that radically changes our understanding of a crucial political issue and helps to fuel a social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Lawyer and activist Michelle Alexander offers a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status, denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights movement. 

Since the dawn of humankind, mental illness has been one of our greatest causes of suffering as a species. But for the majority of our history, its causes have remained a mystery. Professor Karl Deisseroth shares his breakthrough discovery, optogenetics, a biological technique that allows us to decipher the brain's inner workings using light. With moving and revelatory stories from both personal and professional experience, he reveals what mental illnesses really are, why we suffer from them and the unexpected role they have played in our evolution.

The great scholar W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote about the problem of race in America, and what he called ‘Double Consciousness', a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois' words all too well. 

With The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3, award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a year-in-review and 27 of the best stories published by both new and established authors in 2017. 

Vern, a Black woman with albinism, is hunted after escaping a religious compound, then she discovers that her body is changing and that she is developing extra-sensory powers. Alone in the woods, she gives birth to twins and raises them away from the influence of the outside world. But something is wrong - not with them, but with her own body. To understand her body's metamorphosis, Vern must investigate not just the secluded religious compound she fled but the violent history of dehumanisation, medical experimentation and genocide that produced it.

Nell Young has lived her life in and around maps. Her father, Dr David Young, was one of the most respected cartographers in the world. He's also just been found dead - in his office at the New York Public Library. Nell hadn't spoken to him in years - ever since he fired her after an argument over a seemingly worthless highway roadside map. A map which was mass produced - and every copy of which is being found and destroyed. But why?

In the first 20 years of the 21st century, New York City has been convulsed by terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, social injustice and pandemic. New Yorkers weaves the voices of some of the city's best talkers into an indelible portrait of New York in our time - and a powerful hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people.

Since the publication of the first edition of Critical Race Theory in 2001, the United States has lived through two economic downturns, an outbreak of terrorism, and the onset of an epidemic of hate directed against immigrants, especially undocumented Latinos and Middle Eastern people. On a more hopeful note, the country elected and re-elected its first black president and has witnessed the impressive advance of gay rights. Critical Race Theory is essential for understanding developments in this burgeoning field, which has spread to other disciplines and countries.  

It happens in an instant, filling Aija with dread: The Sun is suddenly cast from the sky, throwing the Earth into midday darkness. On the fourth day of endless night, Aija finds an unconscious man by the river. His skin is as hot as her lantern’s glass and just as golden. To Aija, a farmhand with the soul of an artist, this beautiful stranger is an inspiration - and a mystery. He calls himself Saiyon. He bleeds light. His friends are celestial. His enemies, godlings of the moon.

An intimate look at the domestic lives of enslaved women, Night Wherever We Go is an evocative meditation on resistance and autonomy, on love and transcendence and the bonds of female friendship in the darkest of circumstances.

For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these “solutions” do not match the problem: The police cannot be reformed. In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. 

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous Black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. In this first full-scale biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927–2003).

Wonderfully narrated by Karen Chilton, Afrofuturism is an engaging, hip, and accessible primer to the music, literature, and art of Afrofuturism. Author Ytasha Womack introduces listeners to the burgeoning community of artists creating Afrofuturist works. She writes engagingly about the innovators from the past and the wide range of subjects they explore. The audiobook’s topics range from the “alien” experience of blacks in America to the “wake up” cry that peppers sci-fi literature, sermons, and activism. 

Your skeleton is a busy system of living tissue. Every day, bone is being broken down and replaced. But with osteoporosis, this process causes your bones to become weak and fragile. The disease often goes undetected until you have a fall or a painful fracture.

The Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, have been highly revered figures in American history, lauded for leaving behind their lives as elite slave-owning women on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand abolitionists in the North. Yet the focus on their story has obscured the experiences of their Black relatives, the progeny of their brother, Henry, and one of the enslaved people he owned, a woman named Nancy Weston. 

In this blinding debut, Robert Jones Jr blends the lyricism of Toni Morrison with the vivid prose of Zora Neale Hurston to characterise the forceful, enduring bond of love and what happens when brutality threatens the purest form of serenity. The Halifax plantation is known as Empty by the slaves who work it under the pitiless gaze of its overseers and its owner, Massa Paul. Two young enslaved men, Samuel and Isaiah, dwell among the animals they keep in the barn, helping out in the fields when their day is done. But the barn is their haven, a space of radiance and love. 

Danae is not only herself. She is concealing a connection to a grieving collective inside of her body. But while she labors as a tech servant in the dangerous underwater enclave of Bloom City, her fractured self cannot mend. In a desperate escape, Danae and her lover, Naoto, hire the enigmatic ex-mercenary Alexei to guide them out of the imploding city. But for Danae to reunify, the three new fugitives will have to flee across the otherworldly beauty of the post-apocalyptic Southwest. 

A 300-year-old tree has plenty to do: repairing the damage to her bark from people who have carved their initials, drinking from her roots, and, lately, tolerating two lonely bookworms who visit separately. Playing matchmaker might solve everyone’s problems. Rebecca Sky is an award-winning writer best known for the Love Curse series with more than 20 million reads online; most recently her work can be found in the Every Body Shines body-positivity anthology with Bloomsbury. 

Four generations of settler women on a distant world have different perspectives on the return to a natural life after decades in sealed domes. With a final image inspired by the author’s real-life (on Earth!) family history, this short, multi-generational tale explores the tension between the ties to the past and the promises of adventure inherited by each new generation.

Throughout history, the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States has protected the right to bear arms. For Black Americans, this has come with the understanding that the moment they exercise this right (or the moment that they don’t), their life - as surely as the lives of Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor - may be snatched away in a single, fateful second.