Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now

Tourè

 

In the age of Obama, racial attitudes have become more complicated and nuanced than ever before. Inspired by a president who is unlike any Black man ever seen on our national stage, we are searching for new ways of understanding Blackness. In this provocative new book, iconic commentator and journalist Touré tackles what it means to be Black in America today.

Touré begins by examining the concept of “Post-Blackness,” a term that defines artists who are proud to be Black but don’t want to be limited by identity politics and boxed in by race. He soon discovers that the desire to be rooted in but not constrained by Blackness is everywhere. In Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? he argues that Blackness is infinite, that any identity imaginable is Black, and that all expressions of Blackness are legitimate.

Cloth

Standing Above the Crowd: Execute Your Game Plan to Become the Best You Can Be

James “Dukes” Donaldson

Standing above the Crowd will help you rise up above life’s dramas, traumas, pettiness, negativity, and dozens more situational issues that tend to keep us down and hold us back from achieving our dreams and fulfilling our potential.

Standing above the Crowd is jam-packed full of success strategies that I’ve used throughout my life in the areas of athletics, business and community. All are very straightforward and easy for anyone to implement. There’s helpful advice from the team of wonderful people I’ve surrounded myself with throughout the years. I’ve always believed in a team concept approach, because we truly can’t do it alone. The success I’ve had in sports, business, and community involvement has all been because of people and principles I’ve learned from during my journey.

Paper 19.95

Home

Toni Morrison

 

 

America’s most celebrated novelist, Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison extends her profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of redemption: a taut and tortured story about one man’s desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war.
Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he’s hated all his life. As Frank revisits his memories from childhood and the war that have left him questioning his sense of self, he discovers a profound courage he had thought he could never possess again.
A deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood–and his home.

 

 

Cloth 24.00

Sacred Pampering Principles: An African-American Woman’s Guide to Self-Care and Inner Renewal

Debrena Jackson Gandy

 

 

Originally self-published to enormous acclaim and demand, “Sacred Pampering Principles” is a beautifully written guide with hundreds of easy and innovative ways for on-the-go women to pamper their bodies and nurture their spirits.

With her holistic approach to filling your life with comfort, balance, and peace, Debrena Jackson Gandy debunks society’s myth that doing something for yourself is decadent and selfish. In fact, she says, the joy we gain from treating ourselves–whether to a luxuriant bath or to a meditative hour alone–is transferred to the people in our lives. When we emerge rejuvenated, others benefit from a patient mother, a fulfilled wife, an effective coworker, a solidly grounded friend.

Written for African-American women, but accessible to women of all races, “Sacred Pampering Principles” demonstrates not only pampering ideas, but also explains why pampering, for less time and money than one might imagine, is vital to a balanced life.

Paper 15.99

Never in My Wildest Dreams

Belva Davis

Never in My Wildest Dreams is the story of a courageous journalist who helped change the face and focus of television news. Born to a 15-year old Louisiana laundress during the Great Depression and raised in the overcrowded projects of Oakland, California, Belva Davis overcame abuse, racism, and sexism to become the first black female news anchor on the West Coast.
Belva Davis covered many of the most explosive stories of the last half century, including the birth of the Black Panthers, the Peoples Temple cult that ended in the Jonestown massacre, the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor, George Moscone and San Francisco Supervisor, Harvey Milk, the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and the terrorist attacks that first put Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Along the way, she encountered a cavalcade of cultural icons: Malcolm X, Frank Sinatra, James Brown, Nancy Reagan, Huey Newton, Muhammad Ali, Alex Haley, Fidel Castro, and others.
Davis’ absorbing memoir traces the trajectory of an extraordinary life in extraordinary times.

Paper 15.95

Cloth 24.95

Michael Long, John Engel, Valerie Coleman, Belva Davis, Eric Jerome Dickey, Karen Johnson, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Van Jones and Joanne Griffith at Marcus Books, Oakland & SF

Call or visit the Marcus Bookstores and prepay for copies of the titles that interest you. The bookstore staff will be happy to have your book(s) signed by any or all of the writers if you can’t make it. 3900 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way (at 39th Street, just around the corner from the MacArthur BART station) in Oakland, CA 94609        510 652 2344

and in San Francisco, 1712 Fillmore Street (at Post Street) 94115         415 346 4222

Call or visit the Marcus Bookstore in Oakland and prepay for a copy or two.

The bookstore staff will be happy to have your books signed by Van Jones and Joanne Griffith if you can’t make it to their readings.

3900 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way   (at 39th Street, just around the corner from the MacArthur BART station)

Oakland, CA 94609                 510 652 2344

The Freedom Guide for Music Creators College and University Orders

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnr-mKgSxp4&list=UU_q32MIuxh3rjawg5iHteCQ&index=5&feature=plcp

Welcome to all HBCU representatives, and thank you for your support of Marcus Bookstores.

With your purchase of The Freedom Guide for Music Creators, you will empower your students to master the fundamentals of the music business, and give them access to strategies and resources they will not hear about except through your actions today.  When your students receive The Freedom Guide for Music Creators, they will learn:

How the music business will try to put them through a taste of some of the hardest parts of the African American experience since the end of slavery — and what they can do to protect themselves

How to get each and every one of their compositions works the copyright registration they need at the lowest possible cost — AND the address and contact info of EVERY copyright office IN THE WORLD

How to handle SAMPLING — the right way, not the wrong way

How to get the proper licenses to cover ANY song — quickly and cost-effectively

What things they need to have in EVERY record contract — and the very things that will STEAL A MUSICIAN BLIND if not caught

The NUMBER ONE, time-honored, sure-fire way to build a fan base that lasts, no matter what fads and technology come and and go

And much more — all in a easy-to-read, concise format that lends itself to immediate action!

Thank you so much for your patronage of Marcus Bookstores — we appreciate working with you to educate Black musicians everywhere about how to handle their music business!  Order now, and change the lives of the talented young musicians you serve for the better — forever!

College and University Orders:

For 50 books at a 20 percent discount

For 100 books at a 30 percent discount

For 200 books at a 40 percent discount

For individual copies:

Unchain the Pain: How to Be Your Own Therapist

 Bob Livingstone, LCSW

“I will be reading from and signing my new book Unchain the Pain:  How to be Your Own Therapist at Marcus Books, 1712 Fillmore St. San Francisco, Ca.  This event will take place Saturday March 31, 2012 at 6PM.   It is an honor to be invited to this historic African-American Bookstore.  Marcus Bookstores are the oldest Black bookstores in the nation.  I hope to see you there!” –BL

1. Be willing to ask questions about your emotional pain.
2. Imagine that you are in a therapist’s office. Think about what questions she may ask you and then ask yourself these same questions.
3. Imagine that you are talking to a friend who is in distress. What questions would you want to ask her about her emotional pain in order to support her healing? Then apply those same questions to yourself.
4. You will learn to be introspective; feel unstuck emotionally; resolve long-standing emotional issues; discover your place of wisdom; be less depressed; be able to work through grief and loss issues; be less anxious; feel more confident and your self-esteem will increase; learn what it means to process your feelings.
5. Learn to overcome the obstacles that can help you become your own therapist.
6. Develop and nurture the self questioning part of yourself.
7. Exercise regularly. You will not only look and feel better, it will help you problem solve and be open to self-questioning because you will feel the freedom to do so!

Jayd’s Legacy

L. Divine

It’s official: South Bay High’s finest, Jayd Jackson, and its coolest white boy, Jeremy Weiner, are a couple. And if that’s not enough interracial drama for South Bay’s mostly white, wealthy student body, Jayd and her bold, beautiful crew have more on the way . . .

Friends and teachers at South Bay High may be hating, while Jayd and Jeremy are falling in love, and if anyone has a problem with their happiness, especially an ex who’s back in Jayd’s life aiming to sweep her off her feet—well, that’s no surprise. This is Drama High after all. And Jayd is no stranger to controversy—it’s in her blood, and it seems it’s in her girl Nellie’s blood too.

Homecoming is just around the corner, and South Bay High has never had a black princess, queen, or royalty of any kind for any event. But that’s about to change. The Drama Club is sponsoring Nellie to run for the junior class, hoping to give the Cheerleaders and Athletes a run for their money. If Nellie wins, she’ll make history. In fact, Nellie is so deep in the zone, Jayd’s afraid she’ll forget to watch her back because the students of South Bay are serious about their crowns. As Nellie’s chances for victory heat up, so does the hostility from the smartass opposition. Nellie may be flying too high to notice, but Jayd can see the drama coming. And as usual, she’s on it—with a little help from her magical Mama and her mystical ancestors, of course.

Paper 9.95

The Plot Against Hip Hop

Nelson George

The Plot Against Hip Hop is a noir novel set in the world of hip hop culture. The stabbing murder of esteemed music critic Dwayne Robinson in a Soho office building is dismissed by the NYPD as a gang initiation. But his old friend, bodyguard and security expert D Hunter, suspects there are larger forces at work.
D Hunter’s investigation into his mentor’s murder leads into a parallel history of hip hop, a place where renegade government agents, behind-the-scenes power brokers, and paranoid journalists know a truth that only a few hardcore fans suspect. This rewrite of hip hop history mixes real-life figures with characters pulled from the culture’s hidden world, including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Russell Simmons.

“George is an ace at interlacing the real dramas of the world . . . the book’s slim length and flyweight depth could make it an artifact of this particular zeitgeist in American history. Playas and haters and celebrity cameos fuel a novel that is wickedly entertaining while being frozen in time.”
–”Kirkus Reviews”
“This hard-boiled tale is jazzed up with authentic street slang and name-dropping (Biggie, Mary J. Blige, Lil Wayne, and Chuck D) . . . George’s tightly packaged mystery pivots on a believable conspiracy . . . and his street cred shines in his descriptions of Harlem and Brownsville’s mean streets.”
–”Library Journal”
“George is a well-known, respected hip-hop chronicler . . . Now he adds crime fiction to his resume with a carefully plotted crime novel peopled by believable characters and real-life hip-hop personalities.”
–”Booklist”
“The most accomplished black music critic of his generation.”
–”The Washington Post Book World”
“Perhaps one of the greatest books ever written. It has the realness of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” the warmth “of The Color Purple,” and the page count of “Tuesdays with Morrie.” It’s a must-read.”
–Chris Rock on “City Kid”

Paper
15.95