NCW Libraries

Noah's path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at the time such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist, his mother is determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. With an incisive...

"I Was Their American Dream is at once a coming-of-age story and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and...

Growing up in Connecticut in the 1940s and 1950s, the daughter of a prominent black Baptist minister, Shirlee Taylor Haizlip enjoyed a position of privilege and security in her identity that for many years she took for granted. For her mother, Margaret, and the rest of the Morris family, fair skin had been a double-edged legacy, a contrast to the Reverend Taylor's dark, proud, and successful clan. Light enough to "pass," Margaret's father and surviving...