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Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR... SO FAR by The New Yorker Named a BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH by The Washington Post A candid exploration of the genius, shame, and celebrity of Whitney Houston a decade after her passing On February 11, 2012, Whitney Houston was found submerged in the bathtub of her suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. In the decade since, the world has mourned her death amid new revelations about her relationship to her Blackness, her sexuality, and her addictions. Didn’t We Almost Have It All is author Gerrick Kennedy’s exploration of the duality of Whitney’s life as both a woman in the spotlight and someone who often had to hide who she was. This is the story of Whitney’s life, her whole life, told with both grace and honesty. Long before that fateful day in 2012, Whitney split the world wide open with her voice. Hers was a once-in-a-generation talent forged in Newark, NJ, and blessed with the grace of the church and the wisdom of a long lineage of famous gospel singers. She redefined “The Star-Spangled Banner.” She became a box-office powerhouse, a queen of the pop charts, and an international superstar. But all the while, she was forced to rein in who she was amid constant accusations that her music wasn’t Black enough, original enough, honest enough. Kennedy deftly peels back the layers of Whitney’s complex story to get to the truth at the core of what drove her, what inspired her, and what haunted her. He pulls the narrative apart into the key elements that informed her life—growing up in the famed Drinkard family; the two romantic relationships that shaped the entirety of her adult life, with Robyn Crawford and Bobby Brown; her fraught relationship to her own Blackness and the ways in which she was judged by the Black community; her drug and alcohol addiction; and, finally, the shame that she carried in her heart, which informed every facet of her life. Drawing on hundreds of sources, Kennedy takes readers back to a world in which someone like Whitney simply could not be, and explains in excruciating detail the ways in which her fame did not and could not protect her. In the time since her passing, the world and the way we view celebrity have changed dramatically. A sweeping look at Whitney’s life, Didn’t We Almost Have It All contextualizes her struggles against the backdrop of tabloid culture, audience consumption, mental health stigmas, and racial divisions in America. It explores exactly how and why we lost a beloved icon far too soon.
No Color Is My Kind is an uncommon chronicle of identity, fate, and compassion as two men—one Jewish and one African American—set out to rediscover a life lost to manic depression and alcoholism. In 1984, Thomas Cole discovered Eldrewey Stearns in a Galveston psychiatric hospital. Stearns, a fifty-two-year-old black man, complained that although he felt very important, no one understood him. Over the course of the next decade, Cole and Stearns, in a tumultuous and often painful collaboration, recovered Stearns’ life before his slide into madness—as a young boy in Galveston and San Augustine and as a civil rights leader and lawyer who sparked Houston’s desegregation movement between 1959 and 1963. While other southern cities rocked with violence, Houston integrated its public accommodations peacefully. In these pages appear figures such as Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Leon Jaworski, and Dan Rather, all of whom—along with Stearns—maneuvered and conspired to integrate the city quickly and calmly. Weaving the tragic story of a charismatic and deeply troubled leader into the record of a major historic event, Cole also explores his emotionally charged collaboration with Stearns. Their poignant relationship sheds powerful and healing light on contemporary race relations in America, and especially on issues of power, authority, and mental illness.
Revealing the secret history of punctuation, this tour of two thousand years of the written word, from ancient Greece to the Internet, explores the parallel histories of language and typography throughout the world and across time.
Against the tumultuous backdrop of early Texas history, Williams sketches a vivid portrait of a truly American legend. Map.
Winner of the 2020 Reading the West Advocacy Award Winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction "This is a book for all of us, right now." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect. In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief… to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”
The stories in this book, historical and personal sketches, owe their being largely to chance. The whole series was unintentionally begun and the letters letters have come from all parts of the state and from several Eastern and Northern states. The stories are highly enjoyable, for each one will bring back some pleasant memory of oldtimes Houston.
In a small Texas neighborhood, an affluent group of mothers has been repeatedly rocked by catastrophic flooding—the 2015 Memorial Day flood, the 2016 Tax Day flood, and sixteen months later, Hurricane Harvey. Yet even after these disrupting events, almost all mothers in this neighborhood still believe there is only one place for them to live: Bayou Oaks. In Too Deep is a sociological exploration of what happens when climate change threatens the carefully curated family life of upper-middle-class mothers. Through in-depth interviews with thirty-six Bayou Oaks mothers whose homes flooded during Hurricane Harvey, Rachel Kimbro reveals why these mothers continued to stay in a place that was becoming more and more unstable. Rather than retreating, the mothers dug in and sustained the community they have chosen and nurtured, trying to keep social, emotional, and economic instability at bay. In Too Deep provides a glimpse into how class and place intersect in an unstable physical environment and underlines the price families pay for securing their futures.