"Takes the traditional pattern of a picaresque novel—an episodic recounting of roguish schemes gone awry—and decorates it with a richly textured overlay of embroidery, applique, collage and found art . . . Mda writes about hardscrabble lives without dwelling on the hardscrabble . . . Mda's elegant patchwork of clever storytelling, wry characterization and good-natured humor is more than enough."—John R. Alden, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"While Cross-X  might have started out as a Rocky-like story of a team conquering great odds, it morphs into an important, thoughtful, and provocative look at race and class in America, celebrating the tiny—and triumphant—inroad that these kids made in their lives and in the world of debate."—Caroline Leavitt, The Boston Globe

“Byron Pitts’ book should be required reading for anyone who has been told 'You can’t do it.' Faced with obstacles and challenges that many would find insurmountable, Byron through his remarkable faith and the support of his family refused to accept what all too many resign themselves to today, a life left unfilled, with promise, dreams and aspirations sadly left on the doorsteps of our future. Faith without works is dead; Byron’s faith is far from dead!"—T.D. Jakes, author and chief pastor of The Potter's House

"Compelling . . . Raboteau paints Emma's world with grand, sweeping strokes. Her prose is vibrant with life: Here is a crazy woman, here a downtrodden old man, here a homesick Ethiopian. Her timing is excellent, her humor is wry, her voice is on point, and her eye works with laserlike precision. Raboteau's sensitivity to life and to people is nothing short of astounding."—Francesca Wodtke, San Francisco Chronicle

“Ratliff suggests, intelligently and persuasively, that Coltrane had, among other attributes, a 'mystic's sensitivity for the sublime, which runs like a secret river under American culture.'  Ratliff patiently explicates Coltrane's legend, writing in short, aphoristic bursts, often as elliptically as his subject played tenor saxophone, but never less than lucidly.”—Pankaj Mishra, The New York Times Book Review

"The historian and the storyteller in Ms. Satter are never at war with each other. Family Properties is so packed with the horrors visited upon black families in Chicago from the 1940s through the 1970s that you will want to walk outside every 15 pages or so and simply scream in outrage. Yet her tone throughout is dispassionate. She is at heart a historian, not a memoirist. And she is a vertiginously good one. Her book is transfixing from its first sentence . . . the pleasures here are deep and resonant ones. Family Properties feels like something close to an instant classic."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Betsey Brown is a joy to read. Every sentence seems filled with delicate, jubilant, sly, comical, musical brio. The energy, good humor, imagination and joie de vivre make this novel a refreshing exception to most contemporary fiction."—Phillip Lopate

"[The Speech] offers answers that are a lot more complex than the unvarnished praise Obama's oration has gotten so far . . . A rich landscape of opinion on the state of race and Obama's singular relationship to it. Last year, we simply couldn't see these arguments in the heat of the campaign; now they're coming into focus."—Los Angeles Times

"As an introduction to the subject, this book is outstanding . . . The civil rights movement challenges historians to chronicle the transformations that occurred over three decades [and] few have accomplished this task more satisfactorily than Harvard Sitkoff . . . The Struggle for Black Equality stunningly conveys the passion and anguish of the civil rights movement for those too young to remember and to those who prefer not to forget. From Brown to Bakke, Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X, and Montgomery to Memphis, the author vividly portrays the many currents flowing into the river of black protest—the individual and social, local and national, practical and philosophical. He skillfully charts the ebb and flow of Afro-American militancy alternating between optimism and despair, and concludes that a third Reconstruction must arise to remedy the economic and institutional ills carried over from the past. Readers will not find 'value-free' history in the pages of Sitkoff's book, for the author seeks to engage his audience, hoping to shatter its complacency. In doing so, he refrains from preaching, and while he never equivocates in his judgments, he carefully presents a balanced treatment."—Steven F. Lawson, University of South Florida, The Public Historian

“A marvelous read and striking achievement! This engrossing and perceptive biography offers a balanced yet critical analysis of both Martin Luther King Jr. and his epochal times in their full complexity.”—Waldo Martin, U.C. Berkeley, author of No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America

"Picking Cotton is a brave, important book. It puts human faces on the problem of wrongful conviction caused by faulty eyewitness testimony and shows how even good people with the best intentions can get things terribly wrong."—Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D, Past President, Association for Psychological Science and author of Eyewitness Testimony