James McBride

"In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and...

Fleeing his violent master at the side of abolitionist John Brown at the height of the slavery debate in mid-nineteenth-century Kansas Territory, Henry pretends to be a girl to hide his identity throughout the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.

Who was Ruth McBride Jordan? Not even her son knew the answer to that question until he embarked on a twelve-year journey that changed himself and his family forever. Born Rachel Deborah Shilsky, she began life as the daughter of an angry, failed orthodox Jewish rabbi in the South. To escape her unhappy childhood, Ruth ran away to Harlem, married a black man, became Baptist and started an all-black church. Her son James tells of growing up with

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August 1914, Britain is aflame with war and patriotism. Men from all over the country rush to enlist, volunteering to fight for King and country. Most are young and innocent and cannot possibly foresee the horrors that await them on the bloody battlegrounds of the Western Front. How many of them will survive? Brothers Tom and David Duke have spent most of their lives playing rugby together. With the advent of war, however, they too choose to enlist,...

"A product of the complicated history of the American South, James Brown was a cultural shape-shifter who arguably had the greatest influence of any artist on American popular music. Brown was long a figure of fascination for James McBride, a noted professional musician as well as a writer. When he received a tip that promised to uncover the man behind the myth, McBride set off to follow a trail to better understand the personal, musical, and societal...

August 1944. Follows four black soldiers of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division who get trapped near the small Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema on the Gothic Line during the Italian Campaign of World War II. One of the men will risk his life to save an Italian boy who lives in the city where the Waffen-SS have massacred most of the citizens of the town in retaliation for Italian partisan activity. A sculpted head from the Ponte Santa Trinita...