Nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Ajami is a bold crime drama set on the margins of an Arab ghetto. Working with a cast of non-actors in the real streets of Ajami itself, the film deftly meshes characters and conflicts with unsentimental compassion, uncompromising realism, and harrowing violence.

Clawing his way to the top, pimp Earl the Black Pearl believes he is untouchable, but when someone puts a hit on his friends, he has to fight back to save his own life.

"Why do ghettos persist?" Tommie Shelby asks in Dark Ghettos. Today, ghettos are widely seen as social problems that public policy should aim to solve. Shelby calls this the "medical model" because it portrays ghettos as sick patients in need of treatment. In his view, this model ignores the political agency of the ghetto poor and the underlying social structures that perpetuate disadvantage in black communities. Shelby argues that we should conceive...

Traces one year in the life of fifteen-year-old DeAndre McCullough and other people who live near the corner of Fayette and Monroe in West Baltimore, Maryland, telling of their struggles to survive in the midst of the drug market that dominates their world, and revealing the rays of hope that shine out of the troubled environment.

From one of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth century comes the uncensored and gritty novel that inspired today's street lit and hip-hop culture.

After my ninth birthday, I began to really understand the meaning of my name. I began to understand just what my mother was doing for a living. There was nothing I could do about it, but even had I been able to, I wouldn't have changed it.

Whoreson Jones is the son of a beautiful black

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"If you want to rule the streets, you can't get bum rushed. Kenyatta's got the guns and the soldiers, an army prepared to fight the power by any means necessary. But the cops have located Kenyatta's hideout, and they're coming in armed. Kenyatta is not giving up without a fight, so now it's time to man up and go to war."-- From back cover.

Details the lives of three women in Brooklyn--Disaya, Jada, and Londa--trying to find their way out of their troubles by any means possible.

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have...