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

Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit's standards: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams? If you're Detective Versado's geeky teenage daughter, Layla, you commence a dangerous flirtation with a potential predator online. If you're desperate freelance journalist Jonno, you do whatever it takes to get the exclusive on a horrific story.

This audiobook has a simple message for business leaders: your primary goal must be to serve and raise the poor. The poor need to enter the economic system to buy products, put money in banks, and move into the middle class. This is the only approach that can possibly save the American Dream. John Hope Bryant, successful self-made businessman and founder of the nonprofit Operation HOPE, says business and political leaders are ignoring the one force that could truly re-energize the stalled American economy: the poor.

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.

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.

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.

November Nelson lost her boyfriend Josh when a high school hazing incident went horribly wrong. She thinks life can't get worse - then she learns she is carrying Josh's child. She seeks comfort from Josh's cousin and best friend Jericho, who himself is trying to hide the pain of his friend's death by diving into his sports and music. Listeners will get to hear November's story as well as Jericho's as they come to terms with Josh's death.

The Civil War is over, though for Jupiter Smith, a former slave and Union soldier, many battles still lie ahead. He returns to the plantation he worked on before the war in search of his woman but rather finds his old master gone mad, haunting the ruins like a ghost. Out of pity for the now mentally ill colonel, Jupiter strangles him and heads west to seek a new life in San Francisco.

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.

Experience the height of the Jazz Age through the eyes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most notable authors in American literature. This collection includes: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby.

At a young age, Lil J. Skin started stealing pain pills from his mom whenever he started to feel stressed - but now he's graduated to the big leagues. After Lil J. partners with a pusher named Rico on a sweet deal, events take a shocking turn when the buyer - an undercover police officer - is shot and Lil J. winds up wounded and hiding in a crack house.

Drawing on the entrepreneurial life lessons Taulbert learned from his uncle Cleve, Who Owns the Ice House? chronicles Taulbert’s journey from life in the Mississippi Delta at the height of legal segregation to being recognized by Time magazine as "one of our nation’s most outstanding emerging entrepreneurs". Who Owns the Ice House? reaches into the past to remind us of the timeless and universal principles that can empower anyone to succeed.

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.

Spanning more than 200 years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism.

Pittsburgh, 1995. The son of a black father he’s never known and a white mother he sometimes wishes he didn’t, 22-year-old Bobby Saraceno is passing for white. Raised by his bigoted maternal grandfather, Bobby has hidden his truth from everyone, even his best friend and fellow comic-book geek, Aaron, who has just returned home from prison a hardened racist.

In 1945, Willie McGee, a young African-American man from Laurel, Mississippi, was sentenced to death for allegedly raping Willette Hawkins, a white housewife. At first, McGee's case was barely noticed, covered only in hostile Mississippi newspapers and far-left publications such as the Daily Worker. Then Bella Abzug, a young New York labor lawyer, was hired by the Civil Rights Congress—an aggressive civil rights organization with ties to the Communist Party of the United States—to oversee McGee's defense.

When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules—a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.

You know the Super Soaker. It's one of the top 20 toys of all time. And it was an accidental discovery that brought it into being. Trying to create a new cooling system for refrigerators and air conditioners, inventor Lonnie Johnson instead created the mechanics for the iconic toy. A love of rockets, robots, and inventions and a mind for creativity were present in Lonnie Johnson's early life.

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?

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.

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.