Passwords are now required to access your library account. To create a password, select "Reset my Password" from the Login screen (email address required). For further assistance, please contact the library.

Black History Month (Staff Picks 2024)

 

Showing 1 - 9 of 9  There are a total of 39 valid entries on the list.

1. Beloved

Book cover for "Beloved"
Star rating for Beloved
Author:
Morrison, Toni
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Formats:
Book, Audio CD, CD, Large Print, OverDrive eAudiobook, OverDrive eBook, Read-Along Book
Description:
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...

2. The bluest eye

Book cover for "The bluest eye"
Star rating for The bluest eye
Author:
Morrison, Toni
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Formats:
Book, Audio CD, OverDrive eAudiobook, OverDrive eBook, Read-Along Book
Description:
Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity.--From...

3. Giovanni's room: a novel

Book cover for "Giovanni's room"
Star rating for Giovanni's room
Author:
Baldwin, James, 1924-1987
Average Rating:
5 stars
Formats:
Book, OverDrive eAudiobook, OverDrive eBook
Description:
"Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality"--Page 4 of cover. 1950's Paris. After a homosexual experience in adolescence, David represses the impulses he finds unacceptable. In Paris he has an affair with Hella Lincoln, and proposes marriage. She considers his proposal on a trip to Spain, David has an affair lasting several months with Giovanni,...

4. Go tell it on the mountain

Book cover for "Go tell it on the mountain"
Star rating for Go tell it on the mountain
Author:
Baldwin, James, 1924-1987
Average Rating:
3 stars
Formats:
Book, OverDrive eAudiobook
Description:
The story of a teenager's conversion to religion and of the history of a black American family. A reissue. James Baldwin's stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America. Moving through time from the rural...

5. Invisible man

Book cover for "Invisible man"
Star rating for Invisible man
Author:
Ellison, Ralph
Average Rating:
4 stars
Formats:
Book, Audio CD, OverDrive eAudiobook, OverDrive eBook
Description:
First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison's nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be. As he journeys from the Deep South to the...

6. Linden Hills

Book cover for "Linden Hills"
Star rating for Linden Hills
Author:
Naylor, Gloria
Formats:
Book, Hoopla eBook
Description:
The National Book Award–winning author of The Women of Brewster Place explores the secrets of an affluent black community. For its wealthy African American residents, the exclusive neighborhood of Linden Hills is a symbol of "making it." The ultimate achievement: a home on prestigious Tupelo Drive. Making your way downhill to Tupelo is irrefutable proof of your worth. But the farther down the hill you go, the emptier you become . . . ...

7. Song of Solomon

Book cover for "Song of Solomon"
Star rating for Song of Solomon
Author:
Morrison, Toni
Average Rating:
3.2 stars
Formats:
Book, OverDrive eAudiobook, OverDrive eBook
Description:
Macon Dead, Jr., known as Milkman, grows up in "his father's money-haunted, death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely passive mother" and with his friend Guitar who is connected to the secret avengers called the Seven Days, falls in love with his cousin Hagar, learns from bootlegging Aunt Pilate, and then heads south, lured by the promise of buried gold and the mysteries of his heritage.

8. The street

Book cover for "The street"
Star rating for The street
Author:
Petry, Ann, 1908-1997
Formats:
Book, Hoopla eAudiobook, Hoopla eBook
Description:
"The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies"--

9. Their eyes were watching God: a novel

Book cover for "Their eyes were watching God"
Star rating for Their eyes were watching God
Author:
Hurston, Zora Neale
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Formats:
Book, Audio CD, Hoopla eAudiobook, Hoopla eBook, Large Print, OverDrive eAudiobook, OverDrive eBook
Description:
Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy years. This poetic, graceful love story, rooted in black folk traditions and steeped in mythic realism, celebrates, boldly and brilliantly, African-American culture and heritage....