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

It's 1996, and in Houston a mayoral election is looming. As usual the campaign focuses on Pleasantville. Axel Hathorne, former chief of police, was all set to become Houston's first black mayor. But his lead is slipping thanks to Sandy Wolcott, a defence lawyer. And then, just as the competition intensifies, a girl goes missing, apparently while canvassing for Axel. And when her body is found, Axel's nephew is charged with her murder.

A "heartbreakingly resonant" thriller about the explosive intersection of love, race, and justice from a writer and producer of the Emmy-winning Fox TV show Empire (USA Today). "In Bluebird, Bluebird Attica Locke had both mastered the thriller and exceeded it."-Ann Patchett When it comes to law...

Heaven may not be what you think it is. We often think of heaven in two extremes: It's either a dreamy existence where we float around on clouds with nothing much to do, or it's something far off in the future that we don't want to happen until we accomplish all that we want to in this life. Both of these are flat wrong, and Tony Evans looks to Scripture to set the record straight.

A secret network of safe houses, committees and guides that stretched well below the Mason-Dixon Line into the brutal slave states of the American South, the Underground Railroad remains one of the most impressive and well-organised resistance movements in modern history. It facilitated the escape of more than 30,000 slave 'passengers' through America and into Canada during its peak years of 1850-60, and, in total, an estimated 100,000 slaves found their freedom through the network.

Two-time heavyweight champion of the world and record-busting businessman George Foreman has spent his career challenging prevailing conceptions of success and achievement. In this book, he’s stepping into the ring as a coach to teach entrepreneurs the knockout business secrets that lead to...

The city of Austin, Texas, "is fearfully dull", wrote young Will Porter to a friend in the spring of 1885, "except for the frequent raids of the Servant Girl Annihilators, who make things lively in the dead of night." Years later Will Porter would become the most famous writer in America - O. Henry, the toast of New York. The long-ago Austin servant girl murders would remain unsolved. But behind the O. Henry pen name, Will Porter was a man with secrets.

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.

There are over three million Muslims living in the United States today. How can you effectively communicate the good news with such large theological differences? The Gospel for Muslims can help make sharing your faith easier than you think. Author Thabiti Anyabwile, who is himself a convert from Islam to Christianity, instructs you in ways to discuss the good news of Christ with your neighbors and friends. The Gospel for Muslims allows you to focus on the people rather than the religious system. 

Bill Russell was not the first African American to play professional basketball, but he was its first Black superstar. From the moment he stepped onto the court of the Boston Garden in 1956, Russell began to transform the sport in a fundamental way, making him, more than any of his contemporaries, the Jackie Robinson of basketball. In King of the Court, Aram Goudsouzian provides a vivid and engrossing chronicle of the life and career of this brilliant champion and courageous racial pioneer. Russell's leaping, wide-ranging defense altered the game's texture.

In the first full biography of actor Sidney Poitier, Aram Goudsouzian analyzes the life and career of a Hollywood legend, from his childhood in the Bahamas to his 2002 Oscar for lifetime achievement. Poitier is a gifted actor, a great American success story, an intriguing personality, and a political symbol; his life and career illuminate America's racial history.

Henry Brogan is an elite assassin who becomes the target of a mysterious operative who can seemingly predict his every move. To his horror, he soon learns that the man who’s trying to kill him is a younger, faster, cloned version of himself. This is the official novelization of the hotly anticipated Gemini Man, the latest film from Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee (Life of Pi; Brokeback Mountain; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).

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.

Born into “the blessings of liberty in a free State,” Solomon Northup was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Bayou Boeuf region of Louisiana’s Red River Valley. Twelve Years a Slave is the chronicle of his captivity at the mercy of sadistic plantation owner Edwin Epps, who tested Northup’s tenacity and self-control under the most brutal conditions. Until fate brought a Canadian abolitionist to Epps’s farm, Northup thought he would never draw another free breath.

Nine-year-old "Skid" Beaumont's family is stuck in the Louisiana swamps. His father’s vision of New Orleans spreading out into the swamps during the oil boom has brought them there, but the constructions stop short, the dream fizzles out, and the Beaumonts find themselves sinking in a soggy corner of 1980s America. This is the story of Skid’s family, his black mother and white father and his 3 brothers.

Prayer changes everything. Yet so many things get in the way of communicating with our powerful and loving Creator: distraction, hardship, doubt, anger, busyness, unforgiveness, and more. In 10 Prayer Secrets, Hakeem Collins reveals 10 keys to life-changing results that come through the art of prayer. 

The dramatic story of fugitive slaves and the antislavery activists who defied the law to help them reach freedom. They are little known to history: Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist newspaper editor; Louis Napoleon, a furniture polisher; Charles B. Ray, a black minister. At great risk they operated the Underground Railroad in New York, a city whose businesses, banks, and politics were deeply enmeshed in the slave economy.

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?

Telling the remarkable tale of a man who is still remembered on the streets of New Orleans and in the hearts of professional-wrestling fans, this book aims to restore the overlooked Junkyard Dog to his proper place in the history books. In 1979, Sylvester Ritter, also known as the Junkyard Dog, managed to break one of the final color barriers in the sport by becoming the first Black wrestler named undisputed top star of his promotion, and this biography reveals all the famous feuds and business back stories that made him a wrestling legend.

Cow Tom, born into slavery in Alabama in 1810 and sold to a Creek Indian chief before his 10th birthday, possessed an extraordinary gift: the ability to master languages. As the new country developed westward, and Indians, settlers, and blacks came into constant contact, Cow Tom became a key translator for his Creek master and was hired out to US military generals.

In the near future, climate change has hit hard; unemployment is high, and controversial longevity treatments are only available to the very rich. Enter DC Police Detective Jen B. Lu and her partner, Chandler, a SIM implant in her brain providing an instant link to the internet and police records. As a detective in the Elder Abuse Unit, Jen is supposed to be investigating kids pushing their aging parents to exit so that they’re eligible to get the longevity drug. But what really has her attention are the persistent rumors about Eden, a black-market version of the longevity drug.