Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendships

Emily Bernard examines the complexities of interracial friendships -- white and black, Latino and white, black and Asian, black and Jewish -- in this poignant book that includes essays from Pam Houston, Darryl Pinckney, Luis Rodriguez, and Susan Straight, among others. Meet a young Italian American heading off to college, the first in his family to do so -- where he rooms with and befriends a sophisticated young black man from a highly educated, socially prominent Washington, D.C., family. Meet a second-generation Korean American "from the 'hood" who is more comfortable with Latinos and blacks than with Korean kids who grew up in the suburbs, and compares his friendships to bi-bam-bap, a Korean dish of "all different vegetables, meats, rice, hot sauce mixed in together like crazy." Meet a black man who reflects on a twenty-year friendship with a Jewish man he met in school and with whom he can talk about absolutely everything, except perhaps the politics of the Middle East. A book that celebrates interracial friendships as it examines them, Some of My Best Friends is a timely look at a subject that has yet to be fully explored.

Politics & Social Sciences

Bernard, Emily

Social Sciences

Amistad

In this unusually honest book of essays and other writings, Emily Bernard examines the complexities of interracial friendships: Latino and white, black and Asian, black and Jewish. In essays from such celebrated writers as Pam Houston, Darryl Pickney, Luis Rodriguez, and Susan Straight, among many others, you'll meet a young Italian American college student who rooms with a sophisticated young black man who can trace his college-educated elders back several generations; a second-generation Korean American from the "hood" who is more comfortable with Latinos and blacks than with Korean kids who grew up in the suburbs; and a Jewish man who reflects on his friendship with a black opera singer. Though culturally and ethnically at odds, perhaps, they call each other friends; working together, playing together, opening their homes and hearts, even when they have every reason not to. Sometimes controversial, sometimes funny, but always thought-provoking, Some of My Best Friends is a timely work on a subject that has yet to be fully explored.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Mental Health

Harper Paperbacks

Carl Van Vechten was a white man with a passion for blackness who played a crucial role in helping the Harlem Renaissance, a black movement, come to understand itself. Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance is grounded in the dramas occasioned by the Harlem Renaissance, as it is called today, or New Negro Renaissance, as it was called in the 1920s, when it first came into being. Emily Bernard focuses on writing—the black and white of things—the articles, fiction, essays, and letters that Carl Van Vechten wrote to black people and about black culture, and the writing of the black people who wrote to and about him. Above all, she is interested in the interpersonal exchanges that inspired the writing, which are ultimately far more significant than the public records would suggest.
This book is a partial biography of a once controversial figure. It is not a comprehensive history of an entire life, but rather a chronicle of one of his lives, his black life, which began in his boyhood and thrived until his death. The narrative at the core of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance is not an attempt to answer the question of whether Van Vechten was good or bad for black people, or whether or not he hurt or helped black creative expression during the Harlem Renaissance. As Bernard writes, the book instead “enlarges that question into something much richer and more nuanced: a tale about the messy realities of race, and the complicated tangle of black and white.”

Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Yale University Press

A groundbreaking inquiry into the life of the audacious Carl Van Vechten, and his singular and singularly controversial contributions to the Harlem Renaissance Carl Van Vechten was a white man with a passion for blackness who played a crucial role in helping the Harlem Renaissance, a black movement, come to understand itself. Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance is grounded in the dramas occasioned by the Harlem Renaissance, as it is called today, or New Negro Renaissance, as it was called in the 1920s, when it first came into being. Emily Bernard focuses on writing—the black and white of things—the articles, fiction, essays, and letters that Carl Van Vechten wrote to black people and about black culture, and the writing of the black people who wrote to and about him. Above all, she is interested in the interpersonal exchanges that inspired the writing, which are ultimately far more significant than the public records would suggest.
This book is a partial biography of a once controversial figure. It is not a comprehensive history of an entire life, but rather a chronicle of one of his lives, his black life, which began in his boyhood and thrived until his death. The narrative at the core of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance is not an attempt to answer the question of whether Van Vechten was good or bad for black people, or whether or not he hurt or helped black creative expression during the Harlem Renaissance. As Bernard writes, the book instead “enlarges that question into something much richer and more nuanced: a tale about the messy realities of race, and the complicated tangle of black and white.”

A stunning, visual biography of Michelle Obama that finally puts her phenomenal fame into a cultural and historical context we can all understand.
There has never been a First Lady like her before. While there have been a slew of Obama celebrity books, none contain the message of Deborah Willis and Emily Bernard’s eye-opening book. With nearly 200 compelling photographs, these two noted scholars capture Michelle Obama’s dramatic transformation from working mother to First Lady, from her first tentative steps on the campaign trail to her spontaneous hug of the Queen, to her fairy-tale-like “date night” on Broadway. Not since Jacqueline Kennedy has there been a First Lady who has so enchanted America, but in her down-to-earth dealings with all Americans―schoolchildren, military families, and home gardeners alike―and in her diverse fashion taste, from J. Crew to Jason Wu, Michelle Obama is inexplicably all pearls, all business, all mother. The authors show how Michelle Obama represents the culmination of America’s evolving views on women, race, motherhood, and beauty. Much more than a mere catalog of style, Michelle Obama is a remarkable pictorial story of one woman’s hold on our imagination. 150 full-color photographs

Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs

Arts & Photography

Willis, Deborah

Photography & Video

W.W.Norton&Company

WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROSE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND KIRKUS REVIEWS In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily white New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it. “Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.”

Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine

Community & Culture

KNOPF

Black is the Body: Stories From My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine

DOUBLEDAY

Vintage

Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine (Thorndike Press Large Print Biographies & Memoirs Series)

Thorndike Press Large Print

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