An exceptional father-son story from the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.
Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company...

Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city adolescence and through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore...

"The beloved bestselling author of Here for It presents a collection of heartening, thoughtful, and laugh-out-loud funny essays about the lifelong search for community and returning home. After going viral "reading" the chaotic political news, having one-too-many awkward social encounters, and coming to terms with his intersecting identities, R. Eric Thomas is ready to live his best life. Or, if not, at least his best-ish life. Now, in this collection...

From the award-winning historian: the remarkable life of "the most beautiful woman of nineteenth-century Baltimore," whose marriage in 1803 to Jerome Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Napoleon, became inextricably bound to the diplomatic and political nineteenth-century histories of the United States, France, and England. In Wondrous Beauty, Carol Berkin tells the story of this audacious, outsize life: how her romantic, passionate marriage infuriated...

"At nine-years-old, D. Watkins has three concerns in life: picking his dad's lotto numbers, keeping his Nikes free of creases, and being a man. Directly in his periphery is east Baltimore, a poverty-stricken city battling the height of a crack epidemic just hours from the nation's capital. Watkins, like many boys around him, is thrust out of childhood and into a world where manhood means surviving by slinging crack on street corners and finding himself...

Wes Moore tells his life story to help listeners answer the question of what is their work.

"Wes Moore's remarkable bestseller The Other Wes Moore ends when Wes completes his journey from a fatherless delinquent to college graduate and heads off to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. But what happens next? Next, he had to figure out the answer to the question: What is your work? More than finding a job, he had to find the work he was meant to do. For the next decade, Wes traced a path through some of the most fascinating and high-pressure workspaces...

"An award-winning journalist tells the story of his quest to reconcile with his white mother and the family he'd never met--and how faith brought them all together. John Blake grew up in a notorious Black neighborhood in inner-city Baltimore that was the setting for the HBO series The Wire. It was there that he became a self-described "closeted biracial person," hostile toward white people while hiding the truth of his mother's race. The son of a...

"When Cheryl Strayed was asked by the Boston Globe to name a book she finds herself recommending time and again, she chose The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. Now that beloved book has a sequel: The Baltimore Book of the Dead, another collection of portraits of the dead, their compressed narratives weaving a unusual, richly populated memoir. Approaching mourning and memory with great care and an eye for the idiosyncratic, the story begins in the 1960s...