Kirjahaku

Following the breakout success of his previous novel, Freeman, Leonard Pitts, Jr. returns with an even more complex, suspenseful, and intricate story that takes on the past 45 years of US race relations through the stories of two veteran journalists, a superstar black columnist and his unsung white editor. Grant Park is a page-turning and provocative look at black and white relations in contemporary America, blending the absurd and the poignant in a powerfully well-crafted narrative that showcases Pitts's gift for telling emotionally wrenching stories. Grant Park begins in 1968, with Martin Luther King's final days in Memphis. The story then moves to the eve of the 2008 presidential election, and cuts back and forth between the two eras as it unfolds. Disillusioned and weary, columnist Malcolm Toussaint, fueled by yet another report of unarmed black men gunned down by police, hacks into his newspaper's computer system to post an incendiary column that had been rejected by his editors. Toussaint then disappears, and his longtime editor, Bob Carson, is summarily fired within hours of the column's publication. While a furious Carson tries to find Toussaint--at the same time dealing with the reappearance of a lost love from his days as a 60s peace activist--Toussaint is abducted by two improbable but still-dangerous white supremacists plotting to explode a bomb at Obama's planned rally in Grant Park. As Election Day unfolds, Toussaint and Carson are forced to remember the choices they made as idealistic, impatient young men, when both their lives were changed profoundly by their work in the civil rights movement. Forty years later, they are handed a bizarre opportunity to make peace with their respective pasts. Grant Park is an audacious and eloquent take on politics, race, and history, and yet another demonstration that Pitts, beyond his identity as a lauded journalist, has emerged as an important voice in contemporary American fiction.

Could you find the courage to do what’s right in a world on fire? Pulitzer-winning journalist and bestselling novelist (Freeman) Leonard Pitts, Jr.’s new historical page-turner is a great American tale of race and war, following three characters from the Jim Crow South as they face the enormous changes World War II triggers in the United States. An affluent white marine survives Pearl Harbor at the cost of a black messman’s life only to be sent, wracked with guilt, to the Pacific and taken prisoner by the Japanese . . . a young black woman, widowed by the same events at Pearl, finds unexpected opportunity and a dangerous friendship in a segregated Alabama shipyard feeding the war . . . a black man, who as a child saw his parents brutally lynched, is conscripted to fight Nazis for a country he despises and discovers a new kind of patriotism in the all-black 761st Tank Battalion. Set against a backdrop of violent racial conflict on both the front lines and the home front, The Last Thing You Surrender explores the powerful moral struggles of individuals from a divided nation. What does it take to change someone’s mind about race? What does it take for a country and a people to move forward, transformed?

Set in mid-60s Harlem and Alabama, two families grapple with the promise and brutality of the civil rights era in the American South, reckoning with family secrets, unresolved trauma, and the heavy question of what justice demands.The free-standing successor and next novel by the author of the critically acclaimed The Last Thing You Surrender, Leonard Pitts, Jr.’s 54 Miles launches forward twenty years to the fateful weeks of March 1965—from the infamous “Bloody Sunday” march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the 7th to the triumphant entry into Montgomery on the 25th that climaxed the voting rights campaign—and the families who find themselves confronting the past amid another flashpoint in American history.Young Adam, who has been raised in Harlem by his white father, George, and Black mother, Thelma, goes back to his parents’ home state of Alabama to participate in the voting rights campaign, only to be brutalized in the Bloody Sunday melee. He is still recovering from this when he is struck a heavy emotional blow, learning for the first time—and in the cruelest way imaginable—of a family secret that sends him spiraling and plunging further into danger. To save him, and any hope for their relationship, Thelma is drawn back, for the first time in twenty years, to the South she both hates and fears, and to a reckoning that may result in an incalculable loss.Meanwhile, Thelma’s brother Luther is also spiraling, but in a different way. Forty-two years after his parents were lynched before his eyes, and twenty years after the man who led the lynch mob walked out of court a free man, Luther has just made a shocking discovery. He‘s found the murderer, Floyd Bitters, helpless and enfeebled in a rest home—unable to move or even to speak. The old man is literally at Luther’s mercy. And Luther, who has never overcome this trauma that defined his life, is suddenly forced to relive it all again as he grapples with the awful question of what justice now demands.

This is a revelatory, deeply personal examination of black fatherhood by Pulitzer winner Pitts. By turns painful and proud, this tale of black men bringing fatherhood to life tells the stories of extraordinary men who strive to become something they have never known. The fatherless black family is a problem that increases in proportion each year as generations of black children grow up without an adult male in the home. The minority of black men who do live with their children struggle with their roles, often undermined by the fact that they never had a father role model themselves. Leonard Pitts, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, has interviewed hundreds of black men on the subject of fatherhood, relating their responses with unflinching honesty. The result is a disturbing, painful overview of a situation whose seriousness increases with every fresh generation of black, fatherless children: a situation in which black men are struggling to bring the idea of fatherhood to life. Extraordinary men, striving - in the absence of fathers, in the face of intolerance, in the shadow of their own weaknesses - to become something they have never seen.

Since 1976, when he was an 18-year-old junior at USC, Leonard Pitts' writing has been winning awards, including the Pulitzer and five National Headliner Awards. This book collects his best newspaper columns, along with select longer pieces. The book is arranged chronologically under three broad subject headings: "Waiting for Someday to Come," about children and family; "White Men Can't Jump (and Other Stupid Myths)," about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and other fault lines of American culture; and "Forward from this Moment," about life after the September 11 attacks, spirituality, American identity, and Britney Spears. Pitts has a readership in the multi-millions across the country, and his columns generate an average of 2500 email responses per week. His enthusiastic fans are certain to embrace this collection of the best of his newspaper and magazine work, published to coincide with the release of his first novel, Before I Forget. Forward from this Moment is an essential collection from one of America's most important voices.

This powerful novel of three generations of black men bound by blood -- and by histories of mutual love, fear, and frustration -- gives author Leonard Pitts the opportunity to explore the painful truths of black men's lives, especially as they play out in the fraught relations of fathers and sons. As 50-year-old Mo tries to reach out to his increasingly tuned-out son Trey (who himself has become an unwed teenaged father), he realizes that the burden of grief and anger he carries over his own estranged father has everything to do with the struggles he encounters with his son. Part road novel, part character study, and part social critique, and written in compulsively readable prose, Before I Forget is the work of a major new voice in American fiction. Pitts knows inside and out the difficulties facing black men as they grapple with the complexities of their roles as fathers.

Freeman, the new novel by Leonard Pitts, Jr., takes place in the first few months following the Confederate surrender and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Upon learning of Lee's surrender, Sam--a runaway slave who once worked for the Union Army--decides to leave his safe haven in Philadelphia and set out on foot to return to the war-torn South. What compels him on this almost-suicidal course is the desire to find his wife, the mother of his only child, whom he and their son left behind 15 years earlier on the Mississippi farm to which they all "belonged." At the same time, Sam's wife, Tilda, is being forced to walk at gunpoint with her owner and two of his other slaves from the charred remains of his Mississippi farm into Arkansas, in search of an undefined place that would still respect his entitlements as slaveowner and Confederate officer. The book's third main character, Prudence, is a fearless, headstrong white woman of means who leaves her Boston home for Buford, Mississippi, to start a school for the former bondsmen, and thus honor her father's dying wish. At bottom, Freeman is a love story--sweeping, generous, brutal, compassionate, patient--about the feelings people were determined to honor, despite the enormous constraints of the times. It is this aspect of the book that should ensure it a strong, vocal, core audience of African-American women, who will help propel its likely critical acclaim to a wider audience. At the same time, this book addresses several themes that are still hotly debated today, some 145 years after the official end of the Civil War. Like Cold Mountain, Freeman illuminates the times and places it describes from a fresh perspective, with stunning results. It has the potential to become a classic addition to the literature dealing with this period. Few other novels so powerfully capture the pathos and possibility of the era particularly as it reflects the ordeal of the black slaves grappling with the promise--and the terror--of their new status as free men and women.