Download or read book Black Gods of the Asphalt written by Onaje X. O. Woodbine and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J-Rod moves like a small tank on the court, his face mean, staring down his opponents. "I play just like my father," he says. "Before my father died, he was a problem on the court. I'm a problem." Playing basketball for him fuses past and present, conjuring his father's memory into a force that opponents can feel in each bone-snapping drive to the basket. On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half-men, half-heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket. Basketball is popular among young black American men but not because, as many claim, they are "pushed by poverty" or "pulled" by white institutions to play it. Black men choose to participate in basketball because of the transcendent experience of the game. Through interviews with and observations of urban basketball players, Onaje X. O. Woodbine composes a rare portrait of a passionate, committed, and resilient group of athletes who use the court to mine what urban life cannot corrupt. If people turn to religion to reimagine their place in the world, then black streetball players are indeed the hierophants of the asphalt.
Download or read book The Gods of Asphalt Book One written by H. E. Ellis and published by H.E. Ellis. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When police search seventeen year-old Sawyer Hayden's wallet after he steals and crashes a vintage motorcycle they find just three things:The fake I.D. his brother bought him, his real ID without a motorcycle endorsement and the empty condom wrapper he saved from his first night with Sarah.What police don't find is his list. A list of the three things Sawyer blames for turning his once promising athlete of a father into a trucker who's life went nowhere. A list that before tonight he never left home without. Before tonight Sawyer lived his life by that list, like a map he used to avoid the same path his father traveled. A map he used to find a road of own, a road he knew for a fact would pave the way to a college scholarship and a future in basketball. But that was before tonight. Because despite all Sawyer's careful planning his map sends him down a road toward an obstacle he never sees coming. An obstacle that slams him head on and reveals a fate worse than failure. Success. Now broken, bleeding and running out of time Sawyer is forced to make a new list. A simple list with only one strategy. Live long enough to fail.
Download or read book Asphalt Gods written by Vincent M. Mallozzi and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2003-06-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The real basketball deal–the inside story of Harlem’s legendary tournament and the pros and playground legends who have made it world famous. Earl “The Goat” Manigault. Herman “Helicopter” Knowings. Joe “The Destroyer” Hammond. Richard “Pee Wee” Kirkland. These and dozens of other colorfully nicknamed men are the “Asphalt Gods,” whose astounding exploits in the Rucker Tournament, often against multimillionaire NBA superstars, have made them playground divinity. First established in the 1950s by Holcombe Rucker, a New York City Parks Department employee, the tournament has grown to become a Harlem institution, an annual summer event of major proportions. On that fabled patch of concrete, unknown players have been lighting it up for decades as they express basketball as a freestyle art among their peers and against such pro immortals as Julius Erving and Wilt Chamberlain. X’s and O’s are exchanged for oohs and aahs in one of the great examples of street theater to be found in urban America. Asphalt Gods is a streetwise, supremely entertaining oral history of a tournament that has influenced everything from NBA playing style to hip-hop culture. Now, legends transmitted by word of mouth find a home and the achievements of basketball’s greatest unknowns a permanent place in the game’s record.
Download or read book Take Back What the Devil Stole written by Onaje X. O. Woodbine and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ms. Donna Haskins is an African American woman who wrestles with structural inequity in the streets of Boston by inhabiting an alternate dimension she refers to as the “spirit realm.” In this other place, she is prepared by the Holy Spirit to challenge the restrictions placed upon Black female bodies in the United States. Growing into her spiritual gifts of astral flight and time travel, Donna meets the spirits of enslaved Africans, conducts spiritual warfare against sexual predators, and tends to the souls of murdered Black children whose ghosts haunt the inner city. Take Back What the Devil Stole centers Donna’s encounters with the supernatural to offer a powerful narrative of how one woman seeks to reclaim her power from a lifetime of social violence. Both ethnographic and personal, Onaje X. O. Woodbine’s portrait of her spiritual life sheds new light on the complexities of Black women’s religious participation and the lived religion of the dispossessed. Woodbine explores Donna’s religious creativity and her sense of multireligious belonging as she blends together Catholic, Afro-Caribbean, and Black Baptist traditions. Through the gripping story of one local prophet, this book offers a deeply original account of the religious experiences of Black women in contemporary America: their bodies, their haunted landscapes, and their spiritual worlds.
Download or read book Staked written by Kevin Hearne and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In the eighth book in The Iron Druid Chronicles, two-thousand-year-old Druid Atticus O’Sullivan faces the clan of vampires who have been bent on destroying him—including Leif, his former best friend turned enemy. When a Druid lives as long as Atticus does, he’s bound to run afoul of a few vampires—make that legions of them. Even his former friend and legal counsel turned out to be a bloodsucking backstabber. Now the toothy troublemakers—led by power-mad pain-in-the-neck Theophilus—are no longer content to live undead and let live. Atticus needs to make a point—and drive it into a vampire’s heart. As always, Atticus wouldn’t mind a little backup. But his allies have problems of their own. Ornery archdruid Owen Kennedy is having a wee bit of troll trouble: Turns out when you stiff a troll, it’s not water under the bridge. Meanwhile, Granuaile is desperate to free herself of the Norse god Loki’s mark and elude his powers of divination—a quest that will bring her face-to-face with several Slavic nightmares. As Atticus globe-trots to stop his vampire nemesis, the journey leads to Rome. What better place to end an immortal than the Eternal City? But poetic justice won’t come without a price: In order to defeat Theophilus, Atticus may have to lose an old friend. Don’t miss any of The Iron Druid Chronicles: HOUNDED | HEXED | HAMMERED | TRICKED | TRAPPED | HUNTED | SHATTERED | STAKED | SCOURGED | BESIEGED
Download or read book Household Gods written by Judith Tarr and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-07-15 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a troubled housewife awakens one morning as a tavernkeeper in the Roman frontier town of Carnuntum around 170 A.D., she must face plague and war in order to survive and prosper in her new life.
Download or read book Asphalt Gods MC written by Morgan Jane Mitchell and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-07-08 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gods of Manhattan written by Scott Mebus and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-04-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen-year-old New Yorker Rory Hennessy can see things no one else can. When a magician's trick opens his eyes to Mannahatta, Rory finds an amazing spirit city coexisting alongside modern-day Manhattan. A place where Indian sachems, warrior cockroaches, and papier-mƒch‚ children live, ruled by the immortal Gods of Manhattan - including Babe Ruth, Alexander Hamilton, and Peter Stuyvesant. But Rory's power to see Mannahatta brings danger, and he is pursued by enemies, chasing history and trying to free those who have been enslaved. And when he is given the chance to right Mannahatta's greatest wrong, seeing Mannahatta may not be a gift after all. . . .
Download or read book Street Scriptures written by Alejandro Nava and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-05-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The world of hip-hop is saturated with religion, but often this element is glossed over as secondary to hip-hop's other dimensions. In Street Scriptures, Alejandro Nava focuses our attention on this relationship in a fresh way, combining his profound love of hip-hop, his passion for racial and social justice, and his deep theological knowledge. The result is a journey through hip-hop's deep entanglement with the sacred. Street Scriptures examines the reasons behind the rise of a religious heartbeat in hip-hop, looking at the crosscurrents of the sacred and profane in rap, reggaeton, and Latinx hip-hop today. Ranging from Nas, Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Lauryn Hill, and Cardi B to St. Augustine and William James, Nava examines the ethical-political, aesthetic-spiritual, and prophetic in hip-hop, probing the pure sonic and aesthetic signatures of music, while also diving deep into the voices that invoke the spirit of protest"--
Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Download or read book Sparrow Hill Road written by Seanan McGuire and published by Astra Publishing House. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rose Marshall died in 1952 in Buckley Township, Michigan, run off the road by a man named Bobby Cross—a man who had sold his soul to live forever, and intended to use her death to pay the price of his immortality. Trouble was, he didn’t ask Rose what she thought of the idea. It’s been more than sixty years since that night, and she’s still sixteen, and she’s still running. They have names for her all over the country: the Girl in the Diner. The Phantom Prom Date. The Girl in the Green Silk Gown. Mostly she just goes by “Rose,” a hitchhiking ghost girl with her thumb out and her eyes fixed on the horizon, trying to outrace a man who never sleeps, never stops, and never gives up on the idea of claiming what’s his. She’s the angel of the overpass, she’s the darling of the truck stops, and she’s going to figure out a way to win her freedom. After all, it’s not like it can kill her. You can’t kill what’s already dead.
Download or read book The Skin Gods written by Richard Montanari and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this electrifying sequel to "The Rosary Girls," Philadelphia detectives Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne are on the trail of a maniacal killer, who is recreating Hollywoods most famous murder scenes and casting real-life victims.
Download or read book The Percy Jackson and the Olympians Book Three Titan s Curse written by Rick Riordan and published by Disney-Hyperion. This book was released on 2007-05 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this third book of the acclaimed series, Percy and his friends are escorting two new half-bloods safely to camp when they are intercepted by a manticore and learn that the goddess Artemis has been kidnapped.
Download or read book Shades of Darkness written by A. R. Kahler and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Gods meets The Secret History in this “eerie, wistful” (Karsten Knight, author of the Wildefire series) start to a fantasy trilogy about Kaira Winters, the murders that keep happening at her artsy boarding school, and the lengths she must go to in order to protect the people she loves. When Kaira Winters decided to go to Islington—a boarding school deep in the woods of Michigan—she thought she could finally get away from everything she has tried so hard to forget, including some things from her past that she refuses to believe ever actually happened. Everything seemed great until the bodies of murdered students started appearing all over campus. The victims seem to have been killed in some sort of ritual sacrifice. And even worse, Kaira’s dreams are giving her clues to the killer’s identity. Though she tries to resist, Kaira quickly realizes that she is the only one who can stop the violence, but to do so she must come to terms with her past. She’s going to have to listen to the voice that is buried deep within her…the one that claims to have unimaginable power…the one that claims to be an actual goddess. But even if Kaira can harness the power within her, will it be enough to stop the darkness that has fallen over her school? And if it is strong enough, then what’s to stop the goddess from wreaking her own havoc once she’s released? Filled with murder, mystery, and a little bit of magic, this fresh genre-bending novel is a thrilling page-turner you won’t be able to put down until the very last page.
Download or read book The Fifth Season written by N. K. Jemisin and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the world, a woman must hide her secret power and find her kidnapped daughter in this "intricate and extraordinary" Hugo Award winning novel of power, oppression, and revolution. (The New York Times) This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy. Read the first book in the critically acclaimed, three-time Hugo award-winning trilogy by NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin.
Download or read book Justice Wing written by Eric Burns-White and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the world of Justice Wing, heroes and villains have contended with one another for decades spanning four eras. Now, with the heroes in nadir, Super-archer Broadhead, one of the first prosahuman heroes (meaning he possesses no special powers) struggles to maintain his edge with a failing body. This struggle is compounded by a well deserved reputation for being a butthole (though usually not using the word 'butt') and for an incident that cost him his partnership with his sidekick and the respect of his peers many years before. And yet, through it all he continued to both fight to protect the innocent (admittedly usually while insulting them) and to continue to improve both his skills and his gear, under the basic ethos he always lived by: Plan your projects, create and test a prototype, produce the final result, then continually perfect the design with new models. Now, ten years after a worldwide disaster caused by a mad god's desperate attempt to destroy not just the world but the entire multiverse, Broadhead keeps himself held together with medication and black market super science. But, with a young super-archer named Darkhood coming up, continued estrangements, haunted by his past, and finally benched for his own safety and health, Broadhead finds himself plunging into increasingly vivid memories spanning all four eras -- the Emergence of the heroes, their Halcyon Days, the horrifying Apocalypse Agenda, and now Justice Wing In Nadir, reliving his worst mistakes. Seeking validation, he desperately watches a television program that tests and debunks super-feats in hopes they will prove Darkhood's greatest arrow-shot was impossible... only to have the one person he never thought would support Darkhood show up. After a life of pushing prosahuman heroes to train and prepare for all situations instead of grandstanding and making it up as they go along, Broadhead's last remaining legacy seems ready to crumble... along with his very life. Content Warning: This story contains adult language, allusions to and discussions of verbal and emotional abuse, and (brief and entirely undetailed) references to physical abuse of a child.
Download or read book The Search for Gram written by Chris Kennedy and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lieutenant Commander Shawn "Calvin" Hobbs saved Seattle, traveled to the stars and forged new alliances with alien races. With the latest war concluded, it was time to try to decipher the strange rod an ancient alien civilization gave him as a test. Was a little "down" time to work on the project too much to hope for?Yes.Something or someone is destroying the starships of the alien Aesir race. The elven Aesir are in need of help, and all of the signs point to Calvin as the hero they need. He has already defeated the merciless Drakuls and saved Earth from alien invasion, but is he prepared to face this unknown challenge?As the Theogony trilogy comes to a close, a new chapter for Calvin is set to begin. "The Search for Gram" initiates the "Codex Regius," a trilogy that will once again take Lieutenant Commander Hobbs and his Special Forces platoon to the stars. Not even the universe can hold him this time!
