Audiobooks by Cornel West

Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

In this provocative and captivating dialogue, bell hooks and Cornel West come together to discuss the dilemmas, contradictions, and joys of Black intellectual life. The two friends and comrades in struggle talk, argue, and disagree about everything from community to capitalism in a series of intimate conversations that range from playful to probing to revelatory. In evoking the act of breaking bread, the book calls upon the various traditions of sharing that take place in domestic, secular, and sacred life where people come together to give themselves, to nurture life, to renew their spirits, sustain their hopes, and to make a lived politics of revolutionary struggle an ongoing practice. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition continues the dialogue with 'In Solidarity,' their 2016 conversation at the bell hooks Institute on racism, politics, popular culture, and the contemporary Black experience.

Bell Hooks, Cornel West (Author), Adenrele Ojo (Narrator)

Audiobook

Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-american Revolutionary Christianity: 40th Anniversary Expanded Editio

In this, his premiere work, Cornel West challenges African Americans to consider the incorporation of Marxism into their theological perspectives, thereby adopting the mindset that it is class more so than race that renders one powerless in America. His work reflects political and cultural perspectives borne out of his own formative life experiences. Decades later, his arguments continue to capture the theological imagination of many and influence the critical engagement of generations of scholars. In this fortieth anniversary edition, West invites six prominent scholars-whose respective work are grounded in various aspects of black political, cultural, and theological thought-into dialogue with this work, each writing one chapter plus a foreword by Jonathan Lee Walton. Continuing and expanding on the revolutionary discourses that West introduced in the first published work, each new essay provides nuanced lens for thinking about movements of liberation in today's African American communities.

Cornel West (Author), Diontae Black, Kellye A. Saunders (Narrator)

Audiobook

Race Matters, 25th Anniversary

The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of the groundbreaking classic, with a new introduction First published in 1993, on the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, Race Matters became a national best seller that has gone on to sell more than half a million copies. This classic treatise on race contains Dr. West's most incisive essays on the issues relevant to black Americans, including the crisis in leadership in the Black community, Black conservatism, Black-Jewish relations, myths about Black sexuality, and the legacy of Malcolm X. The insights Dr. West brings to these complex problems remain relevant, provocative, creative, and compassionate. In a new introduction for the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, Dr. West argues that we are in the midst of a spiritual blackout characterized by imperial decline, racial animosity, and unchecked brutality and terror as seen in Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charlottesville. Calling for a moral and spiritual awakening, Dr. West finds hope in the collective and visionary resistance exemplified by the Movement for Black Lives, Standing Rock, and the Black freedom tradition. Now more than ever, Race Matters is an essential book for all Americans, helping us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium.

Cornel West (Author), Cornel West, JD Jackson (Narrator)

Audiobook

The War Against Parents

"One of the best-kept secrets of the last thirty years is that big business, government, and the wider culture have waged a silent war against parents, undermining the work that they do....parents have been left twisting in the wind by a society intent on other agendas."-from the book. In The War against Parents, two different parents from diverse backgrounds-a female economist from Wales and an African American religious studies professor from inner city America-come together to assay what they describe as the world's antagonism toward parenting. Analyzing the trends that have led to this shift of balance, from changing political and economic forces to the rise of television and divorce, they call for a Parents' Bill of Rights to restore the dignity of the parental role and our nation's commitment to the well-being of children. "A powerful call for parents to organize and fight back against a society that pays lip service to family values, then abandons mothers and fathers to an economic and political swamp.... A potent presentation that may energize legislators and policymakers to end the 'war' and reassess the needs of families."-Kirkus Reviews

Cornel West, Sylvia Ann Hewlett (Author), Lloyd James, Lloyd James, Marguerite Gavin (Narrator)

Audiobook

Democracy Matters

In his major bestseller, Race Matters, philosopher Cornel West burst onto the national scene with his searing analysis of the scars of racism in American democracy. Race Matters has become a contemporary classic, still in print after ten years, having sold more than four hundred thousand copies. A mesmerizing speaker with a host of fervidly devoted fans, West gives as many as one hundred public lectures a year and appears regularly on radio and television. Praised by The New York Times for his "ferocious moral vision" and hailed by Newsweek as "an elegant prophet with attitude," he bridges the gap between black and white opinion about the country's problems. In Democracy Matters, West returns to the analysis of the arrested development of democracy-both in America and in the crisis-ridden Middle East. In a strikingly original diagnosis, he argues that if America is to become a better steward of democratization around the world, we must first wake up to the long history of imperialist corruption that has plagued our own democracy. Both our failure to foster peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the crisis of Islamist anti-Americanism stem largely from hypocrisies in our dealings with the world. Racism and imperial expansionism have gone hand in hand in our country's inexorable drive toward hegemony, and our current militarism is only the latest expression of that drive. Even as we are shocked by Islamic fundamentalism, our own brand of fundamentalism, which West dubs Constantinian Christianity, has joined forces with imperialist corporate and political elites in an unholy alliance, and four decades after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insidious racism still inflicts debilitating psychic pain on so many of our citizens. But there is a deep democratic tradition in America of impassioned commitment to the fight against imperialist corruptions-the last great expression of which was the civil rights movement led by Dr. King-and West brings forth the powerful voices of that great democratizing tradition in a brilliant and deeply moving call for the revival of our better democratic nature. His impassioned and provocative argument for the revitalization of America's democracy will reshape the terms of the raging national debate about America's role in today's troubled world.

Cornel West (Author), Cornel West (Narrator)

Audiobook