Summer is rushing to its season’s end, which means our bookshelves will want to be covered in thick, warm stacks all fall and winter long. Thankfully, August is leaving us with a few titles to start as the weather begins to cool down, and this month’s offerings have been just as hot as the past few weeks’ temperatures.
MLB star turned minister Darryl Strawberry’s new memoir shares the wisdom he’s gained from his amazing transformation and a blueprint for a new life through love, generosity, compassion, and personal growth.
Romance collides with the mystical in Lauren Blackwood’s The Queen’s Bodyguard, while LaToya Watkins’ The Book of Chuck explores what happens in family when some are blessed with clairvoyance, proving once again that the appetite for Black-authored fantasy novels is always in demand.
Thoroughly tapping our nostalgia, the new coffee book Keep It Beautiful: Inside the Funkyverse of Shock G and Digital Underground, a fully illustrated memoir of late rapper and producer Gregory “Shock G” Jacobs, who gave the world “The Humpty Dance” through his alter ego Humpty Hump and band Digital Underground.
Historian and literacy advocate Carmen Rubin teaches us it’s never too late to learn our history. Her children’s book A Night for the Rice Carriers shares the story of Yaya and Paanza, two brave young women who carried grains of rice hidden in their braids to forge a new life after escaping enslavement, recalling the powerful oral traditions passed down from generation to generation.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture 100th-anniversary centennial gala honoree Edwidge Danticat drops Dèy, and Naima Coster offers us her latest dive into the complexity of Black women friendships in Take What You Can. TikTok star-turned-author Tareasa “Reesa Teesa” Johnson shares what happens after the social media fame in her debut book, Who TF Did I Marry?
For reads that improve our financial bottom line, money expert Anthony O’Neal gives us a foolproof plan, while veteran investment banker Patrick Howell shares his personal journey through the intersection of race, capitalism and what a more equitable economic system could look like in Getting Deals Done: On Super-Achievers and Apex Capitalists.
Clean off shelf space and add these nine books to your home collection.
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