Bøker av Colin Grant

He shows us the famous people with epilepsy like Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc and Vincent van Gogh, the pioneering doctors whose extraordinary breakthroughs finally helped gain an understanding of how the brain works, and, through the tragic tale of his brother, he considers the effect of epilepsy on his own life.

Brought to you by Penguin.'I'm black, so you don't have to be,' Colin Grant's uncle Castus used to tell him. For Colin, born in Britain to Jamaican parents, things were supposed to be different. If he worked hard and became a doctor, he was told, his race would become invisible; he would shake off the burden he believed his parents' generation had carried. The reality turned out to be very different.This is a memoir told through a series of intimate intergenerational portraits. We meet Grant's mother Ethlyn, disappointed by working-class life in Luton, who dreams of returning to Jamaica; his father Bageye, a small-time criminal with a violent temper; his sister Selma, who refashioned herself as an African princess; his great uncle Percy, estranged from his family through his own pride.Each character we meet is navigating their own path. Each life informs Grant's own shifting sense of his identity. Collectively these stories build into poignant and insightful testimony of black British experience. Written the intrigue, nuance, beauty and wit of short stories, and with the veracity and painful revelation of memoir, I'M BLACK, SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE is a unforgettable exploration of family, identity, race and generational change.(c) Colin Grant 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

The arrival of HMT Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks, Essex in 1948 was turned into a significant event by the British media but it is only one small part of a bigger story. Windrush looks at the movement of people after the Second World War in Britain. In an accessible and child-friendly way, the book explores the treatment of Black people, the struggles they faced and those they continue to face as well as celebrating the legacy of the Windrush generation in modern Britain. You can build your own encyclopedia with A Ladybird Book. Other titles available in this series:The Ancient EgyptiansAnimal HabitatsBaby AnimalsBritish Kings and QueensClimate ChangeElectricityThe Human BodyInsects and MinibeastsMountainsPlanet EarthRainforestsRiversThe RomansSea CreaturesThe Solar SystemThe Stone AgeTrainsTreesVolcanoesWeather

"A natural storyteller. This is a compelling and charming read." Bernardine Evaristo'I'm black, so you don't have to be,' Colin Grant's uncle Castus used to tell him. For Colin, born in Britain to Jamaican parents, things were supposed to be different. If he worked hard and became a doctor, he was told, his race would become invisible; he would shake off the burden he believed his parents' generation had carried. The reality turned out to be very different.This is a memoir told through a series of intimate intergenerational portraits. We meet Grant's mother Ethlyn, disappointed by working-class life in Luton, who dreams of returning to Jamaica; his father Bageye, a maverick and small-time ganja dealer with a violent temper; his sister Selma, who refashioned herself as an African princess; his great uncle Percy, estranged from his family through his own pride.Each character we meet is navigating their own path. Each life informs Grant's own shifting sense of his identity. Collectively these stories build into poignant and insightful testimony of the black British experience. Written with the intrigue, nuance, beauty and wit of short stories, and with the veracity and painful revelation of memoir, I'm Black So You Doin't Have to Be is an unforgettable exploration of family, identity, race and generational change.

To his fellow West Indians who assemble every weekend for the all-night poker game at Mrs Knight's, he is always known as Bageye. Bageye already finds it a struggle to feed his family on his wage from Vauxhall Motors, but now his wife Blossom has set her heart on her sons going to private school. This title tells the story of Bageye.

Challenges the popular use of 'myth' as a dismissive designation of the superstitions and falsehoods of 'other' cultures. This title contends that myths occupy a place in our present-day lives that is every bit as important to us as the divinities and heroes of classical antiquity were to the ancients.

Separated from its anchorage in religion, ethics has followed the social sciences in seeing human beings as fundamentally characterised by self-interest, so that altruism is either naively idealistic or arrogantly self-sufficient. Colin Grant contends that, as a modern secular concept, altruism is a parody on the self-giving love of Christianity, so that its dismissal represents a social levelling that loses the depths that theology makes intelligible and religion makes possible. The Christian affirmation is that God is characterised by self-giving love (agape), then expected of Christians. Lacking this theological background, the focus on self-interest in sociobiology and economics, and on human realism in the political focus of John Rawls or the feminist sociability of Carol Gilligan, finds altruism naive or a dangerous distraction from real possibilities of mutual support. This book argues that to dispense with altruism is to dispense with God and with the divine transformation of human possibilities.

A trio of Trench Town R&B crooners, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley, swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers - one of the most influential groups in popular music. This title charts their complex relationship, their fluctuating fortunes, and musical peak.

At one time during the first half of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey was the most famous black man on the planet. This title chronicles Garvey's life, the failed business ventures, his misguided negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan, the two wives and the premature obituaries that contributed to his lonely, tragic death.