Download or read book The Harlem Book of the Dead written by James Van Der Zee and published by Morgan & Morgan, Incorporated. This book was released on 1978 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Van Der Zee was an African-American photographer who specialized in funerals. This book includes many of his photographs, with his comments. The text, by Camille Billops, is primarily an interview with the artist at the age of 91. Includes poetry, by Owen Dodson, inspired by some of the photos.

Download or read book The Spirit of Harlem written by Craig Marberry and published by Doubleday Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tour of Harlem combines photographs with interviews to profile a community in transition, as money pours in to revitalize a once decaying cityscape, a situation that threatens the homes and livelihoods of long-time residents.

Download or read book Dapper Dan Made in Harlem written by Daniel R. Day and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Dapper Dan is a legend, an icon, a beacon of inspiration to many in the Black community. His story isn’t just about fashion. It’s about tenacity, curiosity, artistry, hustle, love, and a singular determination to live our dreams out loud.”—Ava DuVernay, director of Selma, 13th, and A Wrinkle in Time NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VANITY FAIR • DAPPER DAN NAMED ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD With his now-legendary store on 125th Street in Harlem, Dapper Dan pioneered high-end streetwear in the 1980s, remixing classic luxury-brand logos into his own innovative, glamorous designs. But before he reinvented haute couture, he was a hungry boy with holes in his shoes, a teen who daringly gambled drug dealers out of their money, and a young man in a prison cell who found nourishment in books. In this remarkable memoir, he tells his full story for the first time. Decade after decade, Dapper Dan discovered creative ways to flourish in a country designed to privilege certain Americans over others. He witnessed, profited from, and despised the rise of two drug epidemics. He invented stunningly bold credit card frauds that took him around the world. He paid neighborhood kids to jog with him in an effort to keep them out of the drug game. And when he turned his attention to fashion, he did so with the energy and curiosity with which he approaches all things: learning how to treat fur himself when no one would sell finished fur coats to a Black man; finding the best dressed hustler in the neighborhood and converting him into a customer; staying open twenty-four hours a day for nine years straight to meet demand; and, finally, emerging as a world-famous designer whose looks went on to define an era, dressing cultural icons including Eric B. and Rakim, Salt-N-Pepa, Big Daddy Kane, Mike Tyson, Alpo Martinez, LL Cool J, Jam Master Jay, Diddy, Naomi Campbell, and Jay-Z. By turns playful, poignant, thrilling, and inspiring, Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem is a high-stakes coming-of-age story spanning more than seventy years and set against the backdrop of an America where, as in the life of its narrator, the only constant is change. Praise for Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem “Dapper Dan is a true one of a kind, self-made, self-liberated, and the sharpest man you will ever see. He is couture himself.”—Marcus Samuelsson, New York Times bestselling author of Yes, Chef “What James Baldwin is to American literature, Dapper Dan is to American fashion. He is the ultimate success saga, an iconic fashion hero to multiple generations, fusing street with high sartorial elegance. He is pure American style.”—André Leon Talley, Vogue contributing editor and author

Download or read book Harlem Godfather written by Mayme Hatcher Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The first and only full biography on legendary Harlem gangster, Bumpy Johnson who was depicted in the movies Cotton Club, Hoodlum, and American Gansgster. ... Bumpy was a man whose contradictions are still the root of many an argument in Harlem. But there is one thing on which both his supporters and detractors agree in his lifetime, Bumpy was the man in Harlem." --p. [4] of cover.

Download or read book Harlem Shuffle written by Colson Whitehead and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, this gloriously entertaining novel is “fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny ... about race, power and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel" (San Francisco Chronicle). "Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn't ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn't ask questions, either. Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa—the "Waldorf of Harlem"—and volunteers Ray's services as the fence. The heist doesn't go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes. Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs? Harlem Shuffle's ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It's a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. But mostly, it's a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!

Download or read book Cotton Comes to Harlem written by Chester Himes and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2011-08-03 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From “the best writer of mayhem yarns since Raymond Chandler” (San Francisco Chronicle) comes a hard-hitting, entertaining entry in the trailblazing Harlem Detectives series about two NYPD detectives who must piece together the clues of the scam of a lifetime. Flim-flam man Deke O’Hara is no sooner out of Atlanta’s state penitentiary than he’s back on the streets working a big scam. As sponsor of the Back-to-Africa movement, he’s counting on a big Harlem rally to produce a massive collection—for his own private charity. But the take is hijacked by white gunmen and hidden in a bale of cotton that suddenly everyone wants to get his hands on. As NYPD detectives “Coffin Ed” Johnson and “Grave Digger” Jones face the complexity of the scheme, we are treated to Himes’s brand of hard-boiled crime fiction at its very best.

Download or read book Harlem written by Jonathan Gill and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An exquisitely detailed account of the 400-year history of Harlem.” —Booklist, starred review Harlem is perhaps the most famous, iconic neighborhood in the United States. A bastion of freedom and the capital of Black America, Harlem’s twentieth-century renaissance changed our arts, culture, and politics forever. But this is only one of the many chapters in a wonderfully rich and varied history. In Harlem, historian Jonathan Gill presents the first complete chronicle of this remarkable place. From Henry Hudson’s first contact with native Harlemites, through Harlem’s years as a colonial outpost on the edge of the known world, Gill traces the neighborhood’s story, marshaling a tremendous wealth of detail and a host of fascinating figures from George Washington to Langston Hughes. Harlem was an agricultural center under British rule and the site of a key early battle in the Revolutionary War. Later, wealthy elites including Alexander Hamilton built great estates there for entertainment and respite from the epidemics ravaging downtown. In the nineteenth century, transportation urbanized Harlem and brought waves of immigrants from Germany, Italy, Ireland, and elsewhere. Harlem’s mix of cultures, extraordinary wealth, and extreme poverty was electrifying and explosive. Extensively researched, impressively synthesized, eminently readable, and overflowing with captivating characters, Harlem is a “vibrant history” and an impressive achievement (Publishers Weekly). “Comprehensive and compassionate—an essential text of American history and culture.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “It’s bound to become a classic or I’ll eat my hat!” —Edwin G. Burrows, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

Download or read book Sweet Music in Harlem written by Debbie A. Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An African-American boy unintentionally brings together all the neighbourhood's jazz musicians for a magazine photograph.

Download or read book Harlem is Nowhere written by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2011-08-04 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A walker, a reader and a gazer, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is also a skilled talker whose impromptu kerbside exchanges with Harlem's most colourful residents are transmuted into a slippery, silky set of observations on what change and opportunity have wrought in this small corner of a big city, Harlem, with its outsize reputation and even-larger influence. Hers is a beguilingly well-written meditation on the essence of black Harlem, as it teeters on the brink of seeing its poorer residents and their rich histories turfed out by commercial developers intent on providing swish condos for cool-seeking (and mostly white) gentrifiers. In a mix of conversations with scholars and streetcorner men, thoughtful musings on notable antecedents and illustrious Harlemites of the twentieth century, and her own story of migration (from Texas to Harlem via Harvard), Rhodes-Pitts exhibits a sensitivity and subtlety in her writing that is very impressive and very promising. There are echoes of Joan Didion's distinctive rhythms in her prose. This is an exceptionally striking and alluring debut.

Download or read book Harlem on Lock written by Karen Williams and published by Kensington Books. This book was released on 2007-12-25 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When her mother dies and her father forces her into prostitution, Harlem becomes the property of a vicious drug lord and caught in the middle of a deadly turf war, forcing her to call upon her inner strength in order to survive. Original.

Download or read book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America written by Vivek Bald and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Saveur “Essential Food Books That Define New York City” Selection In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

Download or read book A Death in Harlem written by Karla FC Holloway and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Death in Harlem, famed scholar Karla FC Holloway weaves a mystery in the bon vivant world of the Harlem Renaissance. Taking as her point of departure the tantalizingly ambiguous “death by misadventure” at the climax of Nella Larsen’s Passing, Holloway accompanies readers to the sunlit boulevards and shaded sidestreets of Jazz Age New York. A murder there will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem’s first “colored” policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas. Clear glass towers rising in Manhattan belie a city where people are often not what they seem. For some here, identity is a performance of passing—passing for another race, for another class, for someone safe to trust. Thomas’s investigation illuminates the societies and secret societies, the intricate code of manners, the world of letters, and the broad social currents of 1920s Harlem. A Death in Harlem is an exquisitely crafted, briskly paced, and impeccably stylish journey back to a time still remembered as a peak of American glamour. It introduces Holloway as a fresh voice in storytelling, and Weldon Haynie Thomas as an endearing and unforgettable detective.

Download or read book Escaping the Racism of Low Expectations written by Barbara from Harlem and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I was a liberal by default. I asked no questions. I had no answers. I just pulled the lever to vote for Democrats as was expected of me. Most of my fellow Black Americans do not fully understand what the term “liberal” means, or who or what they are voting for. And, in turn they don’t realize how harmful those “liberal” policies are to our freedoms and liberties as Americans. I was born into a culture that believes Black equals Democrat. A broken home, failed marriage, and a feeling of victimization fueled my need for inclusion, which the Democratic Party fulfilled. As an activist and member of the NAACP and Democratic Clubs in Harlem, the men I looked up to—the Rev. Jesse Jackson (whom I also campaigned for), Congressman Charlie Rangel, and Rev. Al Sharpton—reinforced the negative perceptions that shaped my world. But just like false prophets, the false narrative that has been spoon-fed to us by Black leaders, the Black community, the media, and progressive politicians has enslaved Blacks in a victimhood mentality and entitlement mindset. But my eyes were opened to reject victimhood and lack of accountability. My journey has proven to me that when you have clarity of conscience, love of God, and a deep-seated belief in America’s goodness, your life will be enriched and your focus will change to one of accountability.

Download or read book The Harlem Hellfighters written by Max Brooks and published by Crown/Archetype. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bestselling author Max Brooks, the riveting story of the highly decorated, barrier-breaking, historic black regiment—the Harlem Hellfighters In 1919, the 369th infantry regiment marched home triumphantly from World War I. They had spent more time in combat than any other American unit, never losing a foot of ground to the enemy, or a man to capture, and winning countless decorations. Though they returned as heroes, this African American unit faced tremendous discrimination, even from their own government. The Harlem Hellfighters, as the Germans called them, fought courageously on—and off—the battlefield to make Europe, and America, safe for democracy. In THE HARLEM HELLFIGHTERS, bestselling author Max Brooks and acclaimed illustrator Caanan White bring this history to life. From the enlistment lines in Harlem to the training camp at Spartanburg, South Carolina, to the trenches in France, they tell the heroic story of the 369th in an action-packed and powerful tale of honor and heart.

Download or read book A Renaissance in Harlem written by Lionel C. Bascom and published by Amistad Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly recovered from the vaults of the Library of Congress, this rich and varied collection of 45 essays recall the vibrant world of 1930s Harlem, and documents the everyday life in the thriving African-American community.

Download or read book The Book Itch written by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and published by Carolrhoda Books ®. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor, ALA Notable Children's Book, CCBC Best Children's Book of the Year, Jane Addams Children's Book Award, Kirkus Best Children's Books, NCTE Notable In the 1930s, Lewis's dad, Lewis Michaux Sr., had an itch he needed to scratch—a book itch. How to scratch it? He started a bookstore in Harlem and named it the National Memorial African Bookstore. And as far as Lewis Michaux Jr. could tell, his father's bookstore was one of a kind. People from all over came to visit the store, even famous people—Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Langston Hughes, to name a few. In his father's bookstore people bought and read books, and they also learned from each other. People swapped and traded ideas and talked about how things could change. They came together here all because of his father's book itch. Read the story of how Lewis Michaux Sr. and his bookstore fostered new ideas and helped people stand up for what they believed in.

Download or read book Home To Harlem written by Claude McKay and published by Aegitas. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Home to Harlem is a groundbreaking novel written by Claude McKay, a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Published in 1928, it is considered as one of the earliest works of the Harlem Renaissance movement, which sought to celebrate African American culture and identity through literature, art, and music. McKay's novel is a powerful and thought-provoking depiction of the lives of African Americans living in the urban city of Harlem during the 1920s. The novel follows the story of Jake Brown, a young black man who returns to Harlem after serving in World War I. Through Jake's eyes, McKay portrays the vibrant and complex world of Harlem, with its jazz clubs, speakeasies, and bustling streets. The city is a melting pot of different cultures, with people from all walks of life coexisting and struggling to survive in a society that is hostile towards them. One of the main themes of the novel is the search for identity and belonging. Jake, like many other African Americans, is torn between his rural Southern roots and the urban lifestyle of Harlem. He is constantly trying to find his place in a city that is both alluring and rejecting, facing the dilemma of whether to conform to societal expectations or embrace his true self. This struggle is further highlighted through the character of Ray, Jake's friend, who is trying to pass as white to gain acceptance and privilege in society. McKay's writing is raw and unapologetic, as he fearlessly addresses issues of race, class, and gender. He exposes the harsh realities of racism and discrimination faced by African Americans, both in the North and the South. The novel also delves into the complexities of relationships, particularly between men and women, and the impact of societal expectations on them. Moreover, Home to Harlem is a celebration of African American culture and traditions. McKay effortlessly weaves in elements of jazz, blues, and folklore into the narrative, giving readers a glimpse into the rich and vibrant culture of Harlem. He also highlights the resilience and strength of the African American community, who despite facing numerous challenges, continue to thrive and create their own spaces of freedom and joy. In addition to its literary significance, Home to Harlem is also a social commentary on the limitations and restrictions placed on African Americans during the 1920s. McKay's novel is a call for social and political change, urging readers to challenge the status quo and fight for equality and justice. Home to Harlem is a powerful and thought-provoking novel that provides a unique and authentic perspective on the African American experience during the Harlem Renaissance. It is a timeless classic that continues to inspire and educate readers about the struggles and triumphs of a community that fought for their place in American society.