Save Africa

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world's greatest and most brazen smugglers.

Ruth’s beau died - simply because he was a slave.She is determined to help other enslaved people as she assists with the Underground Railroad. Recently freed and illiterate, Ruth is hired to bake mouth-watering delicious bread in a Philadelphia bakery. Her boss Joseph is kind, handsome, and determined to put an end to slavery. She feels emotionally connected to him as they work together for a common cause. His presence is like a fresh splash of spring rain on her parched soul. However, Joseph has plans. He’s determined to make some major changes in his life. He desperately wants to ...

Johannesburg, Easter weekend, 1993. Nelson Mandela had been released after twenty-seven years in prison and was in power sharing talks with President F.W. de Klerk. After decades of resistance, the apartheid regime seemed poised to fall…until a white supremacist shot and killed Mandela’s popular heir apparent, Chris Hani, in a last desperate attempt to provoke civil war.

JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he’s startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can’t seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has grown distant.

The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as “the first organized terrorist movement in American history,” rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable.

Johannesburg, Easter weekend, 1993. Nelson Mandela has been free for three years and is in slow-moving power-sharing talks with President FW de Klerk when a white supremacist shoots Mandela’s popular young heir apparent, Chris Hani, in the hope of igniting an all-out civil war. Will he succeed in plunging South Africa into chaos, safeguarding apartheid for perhaps years to come? Or can Mandela and de Klerk overcome their differences and mutual suspicion and calm their followers, plotting a way forward?

Empty Hands is the inspiring memoir of Zulu nurse and health-care activist Sister Abegail Ntleko. Growing up poor in a rural village with a father who didn't believe in educating girls, against seemingly insurmountable odds Sister Abegail earned her nursing degree and began work as a community nurse and educator, dedicating her life to those in need.

A major literary figure tells “a searching tale of loss, recovery, and déja vu that is part memoir and what-if speculation, part polemic and exposé” (The Washington Post) about two generations of one family - civil rights martyr Emmett Till and his father, Louis - shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Nice Leng`ete was raised in a Maasai village in Kenya. In 1998, when Nice was six, her parents fell sick and died, and Nice and her sister, Soila, were taken in by their father’s brother, who had little interest in the girls beyond what their dowries might fetch. Fearing “the cut” (female genital mutilation, a painful and sometimes deadly ritualistic surgery), which was the fate of all Maasai women, Nice and Soila climbed a tree to hide.

Less than three weeks before the 1960 presidential election, 31-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a sit-in at Rich's Department Store in Atlanta. That day would lead to the first night King had ever spent in jail - and the time that King's family most feared for his life. Based on fresh interviews, newspaper accounts, and extensive archival research, Nine Days is the first full recounting of an event that changed the course of one of the closest elections in American history.

Bound together by shared experience but pulled apart by their changing fortunes, four young friends coming of age in the postindustrial enclave of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, struggle to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as black men in America. With potent immediacy and bracing candor, this provocative debut follows a decade in the lives of Dub, Rolls, Rye, and Gio as they each grapple with the complexity of their family histories, the newfound power of sex and drugs, and the ferocity of their desires.

In the 1950s, Grimzek and his son Michael began a quest to save the Serengeti from modernization by remaking an imperial game reserve into a gigantic zoo for the earth's last great mammals. Grzimek, well-known to German audiences through his long-running television program, A Place for Animals, used the film Seregenti Shall Not Die to convince ordinary Europeans that they could save nature. Yet their message sidestepped the uncomfortable legacies of German colonial exploitation in the region that had endangered animals and excluded local people.

To Westerners, the name Timbuktu long conjured a tantalizing paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold. Beginning in the late 18th century, a series of explorers gripped by the fever for "discovery" tried repeatedly to reach the fabled city. But one expedition after another went disastrously awry, succumbing to attack, the climate, and disease. Timbuktu was rich in another way, too. A medieval center of learning, it was home to tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts.

A powerful story about love, courage, sacrifice, resilience, and hope, True Grace, set in 1924 during the Harlem Renaissance and Roaring Twenties, chronicles the journey of an immigrant, mixed-raced woman from the Congo, England, and Jamaica, fighting for her family's survival. Inspired by real people and events, Grace must navigate the misogyny and racism of the courts, banks, child welfare system, and bad actors to hold her family together. Calling on her grit, determination, and grace, she must overcome harrowing circumstances.

Two tales of a city: the historical race to reach one of the world's most mythologized places and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of al-Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.

The Compton Cowboys are a group who grew up in the city where Kendrick Lamar and Serena Williams were raised; a city portrayed in the media as ground zero for gang violence. But in 1988, with the creation of the Compton Junior Posse, a youth program set on a horse ranch in the middle of Compton, these men and women found a safe space.

Heaven isn’t the reward Darius McPherson expected it to be. For one thing, he’s too young to be there. And now the Archangel Aaron and the Board of Director angels are telling him he has to return to earth to save humanity from itself and an army of renegade angels. He’s not exactly in the mood after losing everyone he loves, including the lovely Rebecca, the soul mate he was about to marry before he was killed in a drive-by shooting. No one seems to care that Junior Operative Darius McPherson is woefully short of adequate training and skills for the difficult task ahead of him. The ...

Discover the importance of trees with Amari and Momma as we learn about the Great Green Wall! From exciting and adventurous to educational and captivating, Save the Land tells the story of Amari who learns what Momma and all of the people in Africa are working so hard to achieve! This engaging book teaches about the effort to combat desertification in Africa.

With so many stories left untold, kids can often wonder if their ancestors had any part in shaping this great nation. Well kiddies, wonder no more! We got you! Parents, now you can pick up your copy of the American History series created by K. S. Horne.