Families - you can't live with them, you can't live without them. Rory Mullan hasn't seen his older brother Declan in ten years. He hasn't spoken to him in four. Which suits Rory just fine. Kind of. Well, most of the time anyway. After all, he has enough on his plate: a marriage in tatters, two grown up semi-estranged children and a rather dubious relationship with alcohol. So Declan's announcement that he is coming to visit Rory's London bachelor apartment fills him with misgivings. Deep misgivings. Which Declan will turn up? Declan the charmer? Declan the loveable if somewhat irresponsible rogue? Or Declan the right royal pain in the arse? What does the visit mean? A final shot at redemption? A reminder of dark days of Ireland's troubles? A chance to make sense of a broken past? Not Quite A Stranger explores with refreshing candour the pain and evasions that can lie at the heart of family and the disturbing working out of grief.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century Jeremiah G. Hamilton was a well-known figure on Wall Street. Cornelius Vanderbilt, America's first tycoon, came to respect, grudgingly, his onetime opponent. The day after Vanderbilt's death on January 4, 1877, an obituary acknowledged that "There was only one man who ever fought the Commodore to the end, and that was Jeremiah Hamilton." Hamilton, although his origins were lowly, possibly slave, was reportedly the richest black man in the United States, possessing a fortune of $2 million, or in excess of two hundred and $50 million in today's currency. In this ground-breaking and vivid account, eminent historian Shane White reveals the larger than life story of a man who defied every convention of his time. He wheeled and dealed in the lily white business world, he married a white woman, he bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, he owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride, and generally set his white contemporaries teeth on edge when he wasn't just plain outsmarting them. An important contribution to American history, the Hamilton's life offers a way into considering, from the unusual perspective of a black man.

Despite Rick Watt's best efforts to keep it together, he feels his life is falling apart, turning him into a zombie. After a cross-country move with girlfriend in tow, his fresh start turns into a festering mess. As a video game artist, Rick is subjected to the incompetence of three bosses and a kinky art director. His overactive imagination helps him cope until... his seven-year relationship tailspins and his ex takes flight with the guy across the parking lot. Other jobs and a new GF don't look any better. Caught between his fantasy world and reality, Rick decides to pull the trigger.
With a foreword by Robert Kirkman, creator of the "Walking Dead."

The phrase Harlem in the 1920s evokes images of the Harlem Renaissance, or of Marcus Garvey and soapbox orators haranguing crowds about politics and race. Yet the most ubiquitous feature of Harlem life between the world wars was the game of numbers. Thousands of wagers, usually of a dime or less, would be placed on a daily number derived from U.S. bank statistics. The rewards of hitting the number, a 600-to-1 payoff, tempted the ordinary men and women of the Black Metropolis with the chimera of the good life. "Playing the Numbers" tells the story of this illegal form of gambling and the central role it played in the lives of African Americans who flooded into Harlem in the wake of World War I.

For a dozen years the numbers game was one of America s rare black-owned businesses, turning over tens of millions of dollars every year. The most successful bankers were known as Black Kings and Queens, and they lived royally. Yet the very success of bankers like Stephanie St. Clair and Casper Holstein attracted Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano, and organized crime to the game. By the late 1930s, most of the profits were being siphoned out of Harlem.

"Playing the Numbers" reveals a unique dimension of African American culture that made not only Harlem but New York City itself the vibrant and energizing metropolis it was. An interactive website allows readers to locate actors and events on Harlem s streets.

For over two centuries, in the North as well as the South, both within their own community and in the public arena, African Americans have presented their bodies in culturally distinctive ways. Shane White and Graham White consider the deeper significance of the ways in which African Americans have dressed, walked, danced, arranged their hair, and communicated in silent gestures. They ask what elaborate hair styles, bright colors, bandanas, long watch chains, and zoot suits, for example, have really meant, and discuss style itself as an expression of deep-seated cultural imperatives. Their wide-ranging exploration of black style from its African origins to the 1940s reveals a culture that differed from that of the dominant racial group in ways that were often subtle and elusive. A wealth of black-and-white illustrations show the range of African American experience in America, emanating from all parts of the country, from cities and farms, from slave plantations, and Chicago beauty contests. White and White argue that the politics of black style is, in fact, the politics of metaphor, always ambiguous because it is always indirect. To tease out these ambiguities, they examine extensive sources, including advertisements for runaway slaves, interviews recorded with surviving ex-slaves in the 1930s, autobiographies, travelers' accounts, photographs, paintings, prints, newspapers, and images drawn from popular culture, such as the stereotypes of Jim Crow and Zip Coon.

This exploration of African American slavery through sound is a groundbreaking way of understanding both slave culture and American history
"A work of great originality and insight."
-Ira Berlin
"Shane White and Graham White's book is a joy."
-Branford Marsalis
"A fascinating book . . . that brings to life the historical soundscape of 18th- and 19th-century African Americans at work, play, rest, and prayer . . . This remarkable achievement demands a place in every collection on African American and U.S. history and folklife. Highly recommended."
-"Library Journal"
"The authors have undertaken the difficult task of bringing to contemporary readers the sounds of American slave culture . . . giving] vibrancy and texture to a complex history that has been long neglected."
-"Booklist"
"The book's strongest point is its attention to detail . . . it] will not only be valuable to young scholars, but . . . to young performers and composers, especially with the explosion of interest in 'roots music, ' looking for new sources of original and searing music."
-Ran Blake, "Christian Science Monitor"
"A lyrical and original treatment of the musical and spoken culture of American slaves. This book is moving testimony to how scholarship can penetrate the transcendent spirit once considered exotic or unknowable, how historians can trace social survival to the human voice in slavery's heart of darkness."
-David W. Blight, professor of history, Yale University, and author of "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory"
"A seminal study of a neglected aspect of Southern and African-American culture . . . and the approach to the topic is both creative and resourceful. The book is highly recommended."
-Michael Russert, "The Multicultural Review"
Shane White and Graham White, who are not related, are professor and honorary associate, respectively, in the history department at the University of Sydney, Australia. They are the coauthors of "Stylin': African American Expressive Culture, from Its Beginning to the Zoot Suit."

Shane White and Graham White consider the deeper significance of the ways in which African Americans have dressed, walked, danced, arranged their hair, and communicated in silent gestures. They ask what elaborate hair styles, bright colors, bandanas, long watch chains, and zoot suits, for example, have really meant, and discuss style itself as an expression of deep-seated cultural imperatives. Their wide-ranging exploration of black style from its African origins to the 1940s reveals a culture that differed from that of the dominant racial group in ways that were often subtle and elusive. White and White argue that the politics of black style is, in fact, the politics of metaphor, always ambiguous because it is always indirect. To tease out these ambiguities, they examine extensive sources, including advertisements for runaway slaves, interviews recorded with surviving ex-slaves in the 1930s, autobiographies, travelers' accounts, photographs, paintings, prints, newspapers, and images drawn from popular culture, such as the stereotypes of Jim Crow and Zip Coon.

Shane White creatively uses a remarkable array of primary sources--census data, tax lists, city directories, diaries, newspapers and magazines, and courtroom testimony--to reconstruct the content and context of the slave's world in New York and its environs during the revolutionary and early republic periods. White explores, among many things, the demography of slavery, the decline of the institution during and after the Revolution, racial attitudes, acculturation, and free blacks' "creative adaptation to an often hostile world."

"Stories of Freedom in Black New York" recreates the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, New York City's black community strove to realize what freedom meant, to find a new sense of itself, and, in the process, created a vibrant urban culture. Through exhaustive research, Shane White imaginatively recovers the raucous world of the street, the elegance of the city's African American balls, and the grubbiness of the Police Office. It allows us to observe the style of black men and women, to watch their public behavior, and to hear the cries of black hawkers, the strident music of black parades, and the sly stories of black conmen.

Taking center stage in this story is the African Company, a black theater troupe that exemplified the new spirit of experimentation that accompanied slavery's demise. For a few short years in the 1820s, a group of black New Yorkers, many of them ex-slaves, challenged pervasive prejudice and performed plays, including Shakespearean productions, before mixed race audiences. Their audacity provoked feelings of excitement and hope among blacks, but often of disgust by many whites for whom the theater's existence epitomized the horrors of emancipation.

"Stories of Freedom in Black New York" brilliantly intertwines black theater and urban life into a powerful interpretation of what the end of slavery meant for blacks, whites, and New York City itself. White's story of the emergence of free black culture offers a unique understanding of emancipation's impact on everyday life, and on the many forms freedom can take.