Here is where you will find what's new at St. Thomas's well known, well read Dockside Bookshop at Havensight Mall. Every week you will find new titles to peruse. Look for updates of our "picks" for fiction and nonfiction.
We will gladly order any books you want. E mail us at [email protected], or call 340 774 4937.
Winning The Race – Beyond The Crisis In Black America, by John McWhorter, Gotham Books, Non-Fiction Hard Cover, 434 pp. $27.50
Four decades after the great victories for the Civil Rights movement secured equal rights for African Americans, black America is in crisis. Indeed, by most measurable standards, conditions for many blacks have grown worse since 1965: Desperate poverty cripples communities nationwide, incarceration rates have reached record highs, teenage pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births are rampant, and educational failures are stifling achievement among the next generation. For years, prominent sociologists and pundits have blamed these problems on forces outside the black community, from lingering racism, to the explosion of the inner-city drug trade, to the erosion of the urban industrial base and the migration of middle-class blacks to the suburbs. But now, in an important and broad-ranging envisioning of the post-Civil Rights black American experience, acclaimed author John McWhorter tears down these theories to expose the true roots of today's crisis, and to show a new way forward.
In Winning the Race, McWhorter argues that black America's current problems began with an unintended byproduct of the Civil Rights revolution, a crippling mindset of "therapeutic alienations." This wary stance toward mainstream American culture, although it is a legacy of racism in the past, continues to hold blacks back, and McWhorter traces all the poisonous effects of this defeatist attitude. In an in-depth case study of the Indianapolis inner city, he analyzes how a vibrant black neighborhood declined into slums, despite ample work opportunities in an American urban center where manufacturing jobs were plentiful. McWhorter takes a hard look at the legacy of the Great Society social assistance programs, lamenting how they have taught people to live permanently on welfare, as well as educational failures, too often occurring because of an intellectual climate in which a successful black person is faced with charges of "acting white." He attacks the sorry state of black popular culture, where indignation for its own sake has been enshrined in everything from the halls of academia, to the deleterious policy decisions of community leaders, to the disaffected lyrics of hip-hop, particularly rap's glorification of irresponsibility and violence as "protest." In a stirring conclusion, McWhorter puts forth a new vision for black political and intellectual leadership, arguing that both blacks and whites must abolish the culture of victimhood, as this alone can improve the future of black America, and outlines steps that can be taken to ensure hope for the future.

Cosmopolitanism, by Kwame Anthony Appiah, W.W. Norton & Company, non-fiction hard cover, 256 pp. $23.95
A moral manifesto that forces us to reconsider a world divided between the West and the Rest, Us and Them.
We have grown accustomed in this anxious, post-9/11 era to constructing a world fissured by warring creeds and cultures. Much of humanity now seems separated by chasms of incomprehension. Kwame Anthony Appiah's landmark new work challenges the separatist doctrines espoused in books such as Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. Reviving the ancient philosophy of "Cosmopolitanism," a school of thought that dates to the Cynics of the fourth century bce, Appiah traces its influence on the ethical legacies of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Kant's dream of a "league of nations," and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In doing so, Appiah shows how Western intellectuals and leaders, on both the left and the right, have wildly exaggerated the power of difference–and neglected the power of one. One world. One species. Challenging years of received wisdom, Cosmopolitanism is a resounding work of philosophy and global culture.
About the series, Issues of Our Time, "Aware of the competition for the attention of readers, W. W. Norton & Company and I have created the Issues of Our Time as a lucid series of highly readable books through which some of today's most thoughtful intellectuals seek to challenge the general reader to reexamine received truths and grapple with powerful trends that are shaping the world in which we live. The series launches with Anthony Appiah, Alan Dershowitz, and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen as the first of an illustrious group who will tackle some of the most plangent and central issues defining our society today through books that deal with such issues as sexual and racial identities, the economics of the developing world, and the concept of citizenship in a truly globalizesd twenty-first-century world culture. Above all else, these books are designed to be read and enjoyed."–Henry Louis Gates Jr., W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
Mad River Road, by Joy Fielding, Atria Books, fiction hard cover, 370 pp. $25
After spending a year in prison, Ralph Fisher has explicit plans for his first night of freedom: tonight, someone will be held accountable. He goes to murderous lengths to obtain the address of his former wife — the woman he blames for his fate and against whom he has sworn vengeance. Determined to bring her to his idea of justice, Ralph's next step is to travel from Florida's sandy beaches to Dayton, Ohio, where his ex-wife is struggling to make ends meet on Mad River Road.
Also in Florida, Jamie Kellogg wakes from an agonizing nightmare of her mother's funeral, and assesses her life: a pretty but unaccomplished twenty-nine-year-old woman in a dead-end job, with an ex-husband in Atlanta, a married lover in the hospital, and a virtual stranger in her bed. But this stranger is everything the previous men in her life weren't: tender, attentive, and adventurous. After convincing Jamie to quit her miserable job and ditch her judgmental, perfectionist sister, he proposes a romantic getaway. While Jamie wonders if this thrilling man might finally be her Prince Charming, they plan a road trip to visit his son, who lives with his mother on a street called Mad River Road….
As riveting and beguiling as Joy Fielding's previous bestselling novels, which include Whispers and Lies, Lost, and Puppet, Mad River Road is a novel about courage, truth, and the strength that comes only when you believe in yourself.
We will gladly order any books you want. E mail us at [email protected], or call 340 774 4937.