Read Long Walk to Freedom

From Detroit Red to Mecca, told to Alex Haley in the year before his assassination.

Michelle Obama from the South Side of Chicago to the White House.

Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.

John Lewis's civil rights years, from Nashville lunch counters to Selma, in three books.

Three daughters of China: a warlord's concubine, a communist official and the author, through Mao's century.

The First Lady and delegate, from Hyde Park to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Trevor Noah on being the mixed-race child of an illegal union in apartheid South Africa.

Two South Africans hunt for Rodriguez, a Detroit singer they think is dead.