What do you do when the system you've sworn to serve and protect marks you for death? Jamal, D-Ball and Andre are back for an EXPLOSIVE spin-off to the A Thug's Redemption series, only this time, one of them is not making it out alive! Jamal was positive that he'd seen the last of corrupt police officers when he took down Kristoff and every dirty cop that was working with him. But a new discovery puts him in even more danger than before. After a bomb is planted in his car nearly killing him and his partner Dante, Jamal is made aware that a hit has been put out on him by none other than his brothers in blue. While trying to protect his partner, Dante runs into another problem when a teenager catches a police shooting of an unarmed Black man on his phone which puts a target on his own back. Dante must choose between being "Detective" Dante the cop or "D-Ball" the no non-sense having thug wit zero fucks to give in order to save this kid as well as his partner. Who will make it out of this drama-filled street novel alive?

Urban girls are marginalised by poverty, ethnic discrimination, and stereotypes suggesting that they have deficits compared to their peers. This book explores the diversity of urban adolescent girls' development and the sources of support and resilience that help them to build the foundations of strength that they need as they enter adulthood.

Twenty-eight years after its original release, The Clash’s London Calling was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame as a “recording of lasting qualitative or historical significance.” It topped polls on both sides of the Atlantic for the best album of the seventies (and eighties) and in publications as wide-ranging as Rolling Stone, VIBE, Pitchfork, and NME, and it regularly hits the top ten on greatest-albums-of-all-time-lists. Even its cover—the instantly recognizable image of Paul Simonon smashing his bass guitar—has attained iconic status, inspiring countless imitations and even being voted the best rock ’n’ roll photograph ever by Q magazine. Now the breakthrough album from the foremost band of the punk era gets the close critical eye it deserves. Marcus Gray examines London Calling from every vantage imaginable, from the recording sessions and the state of the world it was recorded in to the album’s long afterlife, bringing new levels of understanding to one of punk rock’s greatest achievements. Leaving no detail unexplored, he provides a song-by-song breakdown covering when each was written and where, what inspired each song, and what in turn each song inspired, making this book a must-read for Clash fans.

Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era is an edited collection of critical essays and poetry that investigates contemporary elegy within the black diaspora. Scores of contemporary writers have turned to elegiac poetry and prose in order to militate against the white supremacist logic that has led to recent deaths of unarmed black men, women, and children. This volume combines scholarly and creative understandings of the elegy in order to discern how mourning feeds our political awareness in this dystopian time as writers attempt to see, hear, and say something in relation to the bodies of the dead as well as to living readers. Moreover, this book provides a model for how to productively interweave theoretical and deeply personal accounts to encourage discussions about art and activism that transgress disciplinary boundaries, as well as lines of race, gender, class, and nation.

"Challenging assumptions around Sixties stardom, the book focuses on creative collaboration and the contribution of production personnel beyond the director, and discusses how cultural change is reflected in both film style and cinematic themes."--Publisher description.

Hip-hop has come a long way from its origins in the Bronx in the 1970s, when rapping and DJing were just part of a lively, decidedly local scene that also venerated b-boying and graffiti. Now hip-hop is a global phenomenon and, in the United States, a massively successful corporate enterprise predominantly controlled and consumed by whites while the most prominent performers are black. How does this shift in racial dynamics affect our understanding of contemporary hip-hop, especially when the music perpetuates stereotypes of black men? Do black listeners interpret hip-hop differently from white fans? These questions have dogged hip-hop for decades, but unlike most pundits, Michael P. Jeffries finds answers by interviewing everyday people. Instead of turning to performers or media critics, Thug Life focuses on the music’s fans—young men, both black and white—and the resulting account avoids romanticism, offering an unbiased examination of how hip-hop works in people’s daily lives. As Jeffries weaves the fans’ voices together with his own sophisticated analysis, we are able to understand hip-hop as a tool listeners use to make sense of themselves and society as well as a rich, self-contained world containing politics and pleasure, virtue and vice.

In this balanced and thought-provoking study, Russell Crandall examines the American decision to intervene militarily in three key episodes in American foreign policy: the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama. Drawing upon previously classified intelligence sources and interviews with policymakers, Crandall analyzes the complex deliberations and motives behind each intervention and shows how the decision to intervene was driven by a perceived threat to American national security. By bringing together three important cases, Gunboat Democracy makes it possible to interpret and compare these examples and study the political systems left in the wake of intervention. Particularly salient in today's foreign policy arena, this work holds important lessons for questions of regime change and democracy by force.

Thaddeus S. Kenderdine made his way from Philadelphia to Michigan in 1858, staying only a month before he determined to head west. He remained in California for only a year, returning to New York in 1859. This visit is described in A California tramp (1888). California revisited (1898) recounts his second trip to California after an absence of forty years, an 1897 rail trip to a Christian Endeavor meeting in San Francisco with a stop in Salt Lake City. He contrasts his two journeys west as well as the changes in San Francisco and its neighborhood. He also visits Monterey, San José, Los Angeles, Pasadena, and San Pedro; as well as the missions at San Fernando, Santa Barbara, San Juan Capistrano, and San Miguel. His stay in San Francisco coincides with beginning of Klondike gold fever and he revisits old mining camps in the Sacramento Valley before returning via the northern route with a stopover at Yellowstone Park.

CONTENTS: Introduction, Jean H. Baker and Charles W. Mitchell “Border State, Border War: Fighting for Freedom and Slavery in Antebellum Maryland,” Richard Bell “Charity Folks and the Ghosts of Slavery in Pre–Civil War Maryland,” Jessica Millward “Confronting Dred Scott: Seeing Citizenship from Baltimore,” Martha S. Jones “‘Maryland Is This Day . . . True to the American Union’: The Election of 1860 and a Winter of Discontent,” Charles W. Mitchell “Baltimore’s Secessionist Moment: Conservatism and Political Networks in the Pratt Street Riot and Its Aftermath,” Frank Towers “Abraham Lincoln, Civil Liberties, and Maryland,” Frank J. Williams “The Fighting Sons of ‘My Maryland’: The Recruitment of Union Regiments in Baltimore, 1861–1865,” Timothy J. Orr “‘What I Witnessed Would Only Make You Sick’: Union Soldiers Confront the Dead at Antietam,” Brian Matthew Jordan “Confederate Invasions of Maryland,” Thomas G. Clemens “Achieving Emancipation in Maryland,” Jonathan W. White “Maryland’s Women at War,” Robert W. Schoeberlein “The Failed Promise of Reconstruction,” Sharita Jacobs Thompson “‘F––k the Confederacy’: The Strange Career of Civil War Memory in Maryland after 1865,” Robert J. Cook