inner cities

Collection of six stories about the rage, frustration, and determination of inner-city youth written by a fifteen-year-old child of the inner-city.

Chronicles the 1991 season of an inner city Little League baseball team in Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project.

Poems inspired by traditional nursery rhymes depict the grim reality of inner city life, including such topics as crime, drug abuse, unemployment, and inadequate housing.

This book is unlike any memoir you'll ever read. Moving in its frankness, it is a relentless tale of a resilient spirit who took on the worst of contemporary urban life and survived it with a furious wit and unyielding determination. Cupcake Brown is a dynamic and original storyteller who will guide you on the most satisfying, startlingly funny, and genuinely affecting tour through hell you'll ever take.--From publisher description.

Growing up in the inner-city projects, DeShawn is reluctantly forced into the gang world by circumstances beyond his control.

A collection of poems from the viewpoint of a young boy living in the projects.

After his quick-tempered father gets in a fight and is sent back to jail, sixth-grader Bryan, known for being quiet and thoughtful, snaps and follows new friend Mike into trouble.

Follows Porsche Santiaga, a sharp-tongued, quick-witted young woman who refuses to accept her new life in group homes, foster care, and juvenile detention.

Stephanie decides to do something to get rid of crime and violence on her street, leading to a transformation of her school and neighborhood.

On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto--a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original interpretation, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot understand the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the history of the ghetto in Europe, as well as later efforts to understand the problems of the American city. This is the story of the scholars and activists who tried to achieve that understanding. Their efforts to wrestle with race and poverty in their times cannot be divorced from their individual biographies, which often included direct encounters with prejudice and discrimination in the academy and elsewhere. Using new and forgotten sources, Duneier introduces us to Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, graduate students whose conception of the South Side of Chicago established a new paradigm for thinking about Northern racism and poverty in the 1940s. We learn how the psychologist Kenneth Clark subsequently linked Harlem's slum conditions with the persistence of black powerlessness in the civil rights era, and we follow the controversy over Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family. We see how the sociologist William Julius Wilson redefined the debate about urban America as middle-class African Americans increasingly escaped the ghetto and the country retreated from racially specific remedies. And we trace the education reformer Geoffrey Canada's efforts to transform the lives of inner-city children with ambitious interventions, even as other reformers sought to help families escape their neighborhoods altogether. Ghetto offers a clear-eyed assessment of the thinkers and doers who have shaped American ideas about urban poverty--and the ghetto. The result is a valuable new understanding of an age-old concept." -- Publisher's description.