While there is considerable information on job opportunities and employment patterns, or lack thereof, for African Americans in the new economy, there is virtually no information on how African Americans view the world of work and how they attempt to navigate that world. From the Edge of the Ghetto examines how one group of African Americans conceptualizes the world of work, including the types of jobs that may be available and the skills and talents needed to find and do such jobs. Based on interviews with one hundred low-income African Americans in a suburb near Detroit, this study focuses on how people on the margins take stock of their situations and attempt to function in them. It addresses the questions of what they think are the “good” jobs, how they assess their own skills, and how they connect the two. It also explores how these individuals experience social categories such as race, class, and gender and how these impact their understanding of the world of work.

Hard Core Logo is an epistolary novel that portrays a punk rock band reunited for one last shot at glory. Adapting a scrapbook approach, consisting of monologues, conversations, letters, interviews, photographs, and related paraphernalia (including posters, invoices and contracts), Hard Core Logo tells the story of Joe Dick, an unrepentant, true-blue punk rocker, whose no-holds-barred approach to music was severely undermined by the breakup of his band, Hard Core Logo, done in by changing times and fortunes. However, when he and the band are asked by a longtime fan to reunited for an environmental benefit, his passions are once again stirred, and he convinces his band mates to turn the one-time reunion into an actual tour. The book provides a fascinating, warts-and-all glimpse into the life and times of a rock band, and the dichotomy between the grim realities of life on the road, and the rock-n-roll spirit that inspired them in the first place. Hard Core Logo was made into a feature film by director Bruce McDonald, debuting at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996 to rave reviews. Hard Core Logo has also been adapted for radio; a stage version will debut in Vancouver in 2010.

Ashley and her friend Courtney are two rich white girls from Southern California who decided to travel to sunny South Beach for a little fun in the sun but, when they meet two local drug dealers from Miami's notorious graveyard projects they get more than they could have ever imagined.Miami is a place where highspeed chases, shootings, and drug deals are the norm but to these two rich kids its exciting to finally be able to live life on the edge. Fascinated by a lifestyle they'd never known the girls find themselves being drawn deeper into the ghetto fabulous lifestyle where fast cars, fast women, and fast money is the name of the game.

A memoir of a German Jewish teenager who takes on three different identities and crosses countless borders to escape death at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

In this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate and remarkable ways in which a community survives. The result is a dramatic narrative of individuals at work, and a rich portrait of a community. But while excavating the efforts of men and women to generate a basic livelihood for themselves and their families, Off the Books offers a devastating critique of the entrenched poverty that we so often ignore in America, and reveals how the underground economy is an inevitable response to the ghetto's appalling isolation from the rest of the country.

From "fiction's foremost chronicler of the Holocaust" (Philip Roth), here is a haunting novel about an unforgettable group of Jewish partisans fighting the Nazis during World War II. Battling numbing cold, ever-present hunger, and German soldiers determined to hunt them down, four dozen resistance fighters—escapees from a nearby ghetto—hide in a Ukrainian forest, determined to survive the war, sabotage the German war effort, and rescue as many Jews as they can from the trains taking them to concentration camps. Their leader is relentless in his efforts to turn his ragtag band of men and boys into a disciplined force that accomplishes its goals without losing its moral compass. And so when they're not raiding peasants' homes for food and supplies, or training with the weapons taken from the soldiers they have ambushed and killed, the partisans read books of faith and philosophy that they have rescued from abandoned Jewish homes, and they draw strength from the women, the elderly, and the remarkably resilient orphaned children they are protecting. When they hear about the advances being made by the Soviet Army, the partisans prepare for what they know will be a furious attack on their compound by the retreating Germans. In the heartbreaking aftermath, the survivors emerge from the forest to bury their dead, care for their wounded, and grimly confront a world that is surprised by their existence—and profoundly unwelcoming. Narrated by seventeen-year-old Edmund—a member of the group who maintains his own inner resolve with memories of his parents and their life before the war—this powerful story of Jews who fought back is suffused with the riveting detail that Aharon Appelfeld was uniquely able to bring to his award-winning novels.

Inspired by true events, David Safier's 28 Days: A Novel of Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto is a harrowing historical YA that chronicles the brutality of the Holocaust. Warsaw, 1942. Sixteen-year old Mira smuggles food into the Ghetto to keep herself and her family alive. When she discovers that the entire Ghetto is to be "liquidated"—killed or "resettled" to concentration camps—she desperately tries to find a way to save her family. She meets a group of young people who are planning the unthinkable: an uprising against the occupying forces. Mira joins the resistance fighters who, with minimal supplies and weapons, end up holding out for twenty-eight days, longer than anyone had thought possible.

Back from the Edge of Hell is Pinklon Thomas’s amazing true story. Born into a stable family unit with loving, hardworking, God fearing parents, Pinklon allows himself to be lured into the gangster lifestyle and becomes a heroin addict at age twelve. When fifteen, he quits school, commits armed robberies, steals from a drug lord and is hunted by hired killers. Boxing offers him a way out and he wins a world heavyweight title, but remains in the clutches of drug addiction. What will happen to Pinklon? The answer comes in an unexpected way.