American Violence

One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in innocent sixteen-year-old Bobby being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity. In The Other Side of Prospect, he has produced an immersive portrait of a seminal community in an old American city now beset by division and gun violence.

Previously titled: An Obsessed Kind of Love Jessica is more than the baby momma of Dominic... She's a social media influencer with 1.1 million followers. Many worship her for all the wrong reasons. So does Dominic. What could go wrong... Everything! The more money she makes, the more naked she gets and some of her followers want more... Dominic aint having it! He wants her to stop. He wants her back. But when he realizes that she is enamored with his rival, all bets are off. Jessica doesn’t listen and soon, things start to happen. Dominic is watching. His jealousy is heating up. He ...

Leisha thought she would never get rid of her ex, Kadeem. Thirteen years of drama, anguish, and heartache, then she finally got free… Until all hell broke loose. On top of dealing with the aftermath of trauma, Leisha is contemplating something new with Manuel… Are Manny’s motives pure, or are all men the same? Manuel has always been known for his persistence. It was what helped him start his graphic design company in high school and segue into owning his current location, with prospects of a second in the near future. All Manny wants is to settle down with the right woman. He believes...

In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the US Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery.

Is America destined to always be a violent nation? This sweeping history by U.S. senator Chris Murphy explores the origins of our violent impulses, the roots of our obsession with firearms, and the mythologies that prevent us from confronting our national crisis. In many ways, the United States sets the pace for other nations to follow. Yet on the most important human concern - the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from physical harm - America isn’t a leader.

In the summer of 2017, twenty-two-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind vanished. A week after she disappeared, police arrested the white couple who lived upstairs from Savanna and emerged from their apartment carrying an infant girl. The baby was Savanna’s, but Savanna’s body would not be found for days. The horrifying crime sent shock waves far beyond Fargo, North Dakota, where it occurred, and helped expose the sexual and physical violence Native American women and girls have endured since the country’s colonization.

Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and on-the-ground investigative reporting under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups. At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right.

In this bold and provocative book, historian Gregory Smithers investigates how African Americans have narrated, remembered, and represented slave-breeding practices. He argues that while social and economic historians have downplayed the significance of slave breeding, African Americans have refused to forget the violence and sexual coercion associated with the plantation South.

American Oz is a rollicking, gritty, adventurous story of life in the secretive subculture of traveling carnivals. You'll never see your state fair or street festival the same way again. Comerford writes a bold, inspiring true story of a year working behind the scenes with the colorful characters and legends of carnivals. He shares stories of freaks, a carnival pimp, a tramp gold miner, and the last king of the sideshows.

On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of Black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes. But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift.

Ersula J. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community.

Isis was just getting her life back on track. After being brutally attacked by the man she loved, Isis had uprooted her children and was trying to pursue her dreams as a designer. Seemingly, she was doing well until the uneasy truth came back to hunt her. Vaughn, her estranged husband, would go to any length to have Isis right where he wanted her—in fear for her life. Will Isis be able to end his rapture or is this just the beginning of life on the run?

In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for Reconstruction 2.0, a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions - those restitutions promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than 150 years. And, most of all, Jones delivers strategies for how we can effect change as citizens and allies while nurturing ourselves in the fight against a system that is still rigged.

In 2017, sociologist Ranita Ray stepped inside a fourth-grade classroom in one of the nation’s largest majority-minority districts in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was there to conduct research on the lack of resources and budget cuts that regularly face public schools. However, a few months into her immersion, a disturbed Ray recognized that that greatest impediment to students was the “slow violence” that preys on their minds, bodies, and spirits at the hands of teachers and administrators who are charged with their care.

Some men are pups and others are hounds, but they all bite in the end. Cheryl Greene doesn’t ask much of life: a smile and a kind word are gifts in her world of splintered families and big talking men. But when Cheryl is cast from her home, pregnant and alone, just making it through each day becomes a fight to survive. Committed to giving her son the security she never had, Cheryl must navigate a reality where women are cheap, opportunities scarce, and violence is the law of the land. With steely optimism, the young mother grits her teeth through the punches, the hunger, and the ...

In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For fans of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon. During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,” Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.” At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.

Nikki Turner, Queen of Hip-Hop Lit, is back with one of her gutsiest female characters yet, a glamorous chick with a high-end hustle that can rival any man’s game. As the respected, renowned concierge for a luxury hotel chain, Beijing Lee caters to the wealthy and famous. Whether it’s securing a dinner reservation, a fleet of limos, or a record deal, or protecting her clients from the paparazzi, there’s nothing Beijing can’t do. She’s stacked up an impressive pile of IOUs from the world’s elite - and one day she decides it’s time to start cashing in.

The bizarre snowstorm of August 27, 1967, changed the world forever. The burning snowflakes (spores) delivered death for some and transformation to others. Every surviving human touched by the spores received an unpredictable blessing or curse. Some became gods while others became monsters. It was the first wave of an alien invasion that heralded the coming of the reptile/rodent species known as the Breedite. The carnivorous creatures were known throughout the universe as horrific beings with an insatiable appetite for flesh. The Castaways, who were marked by all the world's governments as ...

Inner-city Black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence; in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. How you dress, talk, and behave can have life-or-death consequences, with young people particularly at risk. The most powerful force counteracting this code and its reign of terror is the strong, loving, decent family, and we meet many heroic figures in the course of this narrative.

Four action packed, urban stories in one grand collection. Whatever It Takes Cash rules everything around us and that’s not excluding the rent. Quay stepped into the strip game not by choice, but because she didn’t have any other options. After her good-for-nothing man puts them in a bind that could get her and her daughter thrown out in the harsh, rough streets of Jacksonville, Florida, Quay makes a decision to cross the ultimate line. When her brash plot to get deeper in the game puts her life on the line, Quay has to do whatever it takes to survive. Diggin’ Gold There's not a woman...