Showing results by narrator "Robin Miles" in All Categories

Twelve-year-old Ann Maria Weems works from sunup to sundown, wraps rags around her feet in the winter, and must do whatever her master or mistress orders—but she has something that many plantation slaves don't have. She has her wonderful family around her. To Ann, her teasing brothers, her older sister, and her protective and loving parents are everything. And then one day, they are gone. Separated from her family by her master and shipped off as a housemaid, Ann learns something about independence and about love before the opportunity for escape arrives.

A classic of American literature from a Nobel Prize winning author, The Sound and the Fury is widely considered to be one of the best novels of the twentieth century. William Faulkner expertly illustrates the epic and tragic story of the Compson family, three generations of Southern aristocrats on the brink of ruin. Unprecedented for its time, Faulkner weaves a tale spanning nearly two decades, told from multiple points of view in a style all its own.

In the 1950s, after the publication of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel reconsidering the life of one of the most well-known Biblical figures, Herod the Great, reimagining him in a very different light than his villainous portrayal in the New Testament. In Hurston’s retelling, Herod is a forerunner of Christ, a religious and philosophical man who enriched Jewish culture and lived a life of adventure.

Young and idealistic, Tori Hogan travels to Kenya as an intern for Save the Children, intent upon doing her part to improve the lives of refugees. But the cynicism of a young African boy changes Tori’s life and sets her on a course to reconsider everything she thought she knew about helping those in need. Years later, Tori returns to Africa and embarks on a journey through Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, searching for the truth about what does and does not work in international aid.

Fifteen-year-old Marisol is the daughter of a soucouyant. Every new moon, she sheds her skin like the many women before her, shifting into a fireball witch who must fly into the night and slowly sip from the lives of others to sustain her own. But Brooklyn is no place for fireball witches with all its bright lights, shut windows, and bolt-locked doors.… While Marisol hoped they would leave their old traditions behind when they emigrated from the islands, she knows this will never happen while she remains ensnared by the one person who keeps her chained to her magical past—her mother.

Before the Civil War, Black opera singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield reigned supreme on Northern stages—even performing at Buckingham Palace. Novelist Tiffany L Warren brings this remarkable but forgotten diva’s remarkable story to life for modern listeners.

Nettie Boileau joins the Black Panthers’ Free Health Clinics in Oakland in 1968 and is soon swept up in an all-consuming love affair with Melvin Mosley, a defense captain of the Black Panther Party. When Nettie and Melvin head to Chicago to help launch the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, they find themselves targets of J. Edgar Hoover’s famous covert campaigns against civil rights leaders. As she learns more about the inner workings of the Panthers, Nettie discovers that fighting for social justice may not always mean equal justice for women.

By beginning a conversation that encourages self-examination and compassion, Combined Destinies invites listeners to look at how white Americans have been hurt by the very ideology that their ancestors created. Editors Ann Todd Jealous and Caroline T. Haskell, both experienced psychotherapists skilled at facilitating dialogue about racial issues, are cognizant of the challenges that even the thought of such conversations often presents. Their book is based on the premise that for positive and lasting change to occur, hearts as well as minds must be opened.

Against the backdrop of bloody battles and political maneuvering, thousands of African Americans spent the Civil War trying to hold their families together. Whether enslaved or free, they strove not only to survive but also to cultivate bonds of family, friendship, and community. This moving book illuminates that struggle through the letters exchanged by African Americans before, during, and just after the war.

In this mesmerizing fantasy rooted in Urhobo and West African folklore, sixteen-year-old Naborhi longs for a life away from her small, traditional clan in Kokori. But as her rite of passage approaches and she is betrothed to an arrogant young man, Naborhi feels her dreams slipping away from her. Then Naborhi becomes bonded to a mysterious animal and begins having harrowing visions of a kidnapped boy. She soon meets Atai, the son of an Oracle from a rival queendom, and learns that she is being guided by the gods.

The stories in this anthology range from quietly strange to ambitiously speculative. Humans transform into cosmic energy or sentient algae. A man wakes up in a new body in a world with continents cut out, months absent from the calendar year, and souls misplaced. Students at a high school regularly vanish without a trace. A woman descends into the depths of the ocean and encounters all-knowing creatures who may have the answers to her deepest questions.

In a Philippines of desperate beauty and rank corruption, two seemingly unrelated events occur: the discovery of an ancient lost tribe living in a remote mountainous area and the arrival of a celebrity-studded, American film crew, there to make an epic Vietnam War movie. But the lost tribe may be a clever hoax and the Hollywood movie seems doomed as the cast and crew continue to self-destruct in a cloud of drugs and ego.

In a lifesaving guide for parents, Dr. Abigail Gewirtz shows how to use the most basic tool at your disposal—conversation—to give children real help in dealing with the worries, stress, and other negative emotions caused by problems in the world, from active shooter drills to climate change. But it's not just how to talk to your kids, it's also what to say: The heart of When the World Feels Like a Scary Place is a series of scripts—with actual dialogue, talking points, prompts, and insightful asides—that are each age-appropriate and centered around different issues.

Though the land of Kun used to be lush and green, Amara has only ever known her homeland as a dry, dusty desert. When the griots vanished more than a decade ago, they took their magic with them, along with goddess Oala’s gifts of rain and plenty, leaving Kun controlled by a powerful and uncaring king. And though her foster mother, Zirachi, assures her that Kun is not under a curse, Amara can’t help but wonder if her own origin, which is shrouded in mystery, is somehow linked to the broken kingdom.

Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Redlined exposes the racist lending rules that refuse mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident. As blacks move deeper into Chicago’s West Side during the 1960s, whites flee by the thousands. But Linda Gartz’s parents, Fred and Lil, choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming previous prejudices as they meet and form friendships with their African American neighbors.

Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.