Coming Of Age In The Ghetto

“THE GHETTO GIRLS have somehow won a free trip to Marsay, France, to perform our play “Ghetto Girls Rule”. Rose couldn’t come because she is too little. So, it was me and my other sister Evelyn. Our mama said we could go if Robin Ann took responsibility for us. And since our mama hardly ever home, she wouldn’t miss us anyway. Robin Ann said it would be a good chance to get away from her brothers and house responsibilities and them girls up the way.” When a senseless shooting ends the life of a dear friend in front of their very eyes, the Ghetto Girls struggle to come to terms with the grief—and fear—that remains. They need to get away from it all (by any means necessary), so when the opportunity to go on an all expenses paid trip to Marseilles, France, comes about, the choice is simple for the twelve friends. And if the invitation wasn’t exactly intended for them, well, no one need be the wiser... None of them—not gum-poppin’, tough-talkin’ Beretta, not aspiring lawyer Deen, not even Leona with her fur coat and smattering of French—are prepared for what lies ahead. Will the young and hopeful Ghetto Girls return home triumphant, or will everything just continue to fall apart? By turns funny, tense, and deeply moving, this novel’s grounding in Black inner-city teen culture rings all the more true when the girls find themselves in the strange and picturesque French city, where they will have to depend on each other if they are to survive the adventure of a lifetime.

The bulk of this work consists of the presentation of the edited narratives of 18 Holocaust survivors. The narratives were edited to focus attention on practical and emotional survival strategies they practiced during their ordeal, with an eye towards discovering later effects. In the final chapter, the author presents a sociological theory dubbed the "Challenged Identity Model," in which she posits that challenged identity, interactional emergents, and survival communality combine to allow survivors to acquire the means to rename the coordinates of their own existence and identify others within them. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"Coming of Age with the Jesuits" chronicles a young man's formative years from 1959 to 1968 studying on the undergraduate level at Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Missouri, and for the Ph.D. at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. Between junior and senior year Curran had his first educational experience in Latin America studying at the National University of Mexico and traveling to Guatemala. This would lead to an increase in his love of languages and area studies and a future teaching career committed to the same at Arizona State University. The book is not an academic treatise on the Jesuits or their method of study, the "Ratio Studiorum," but rather a chronicle of the experiences in their schools by a young man introduced to Jesuit ways and discipline followed by serious study along with college fun and travel. Students from the 1960s will surely recall, relate to and enjoy similar moments in their own days with the Jesuits. The book chronicles as well the on-going process of growing up of a small town farm boy experiencing the big city, college, foreign travel and the next step of serious study with more precise career goals on the graduate level.

This book is an important work in Holocaust literature and was originally published in Poland in 1967. Covering the years 1939-1945, it is the author's account of her experience growing up in the Warsaw ghetto and her eventual deportation to, imprisonment in, and survival of the Majdanek, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Neustadt-Glewe camps. Since the old, the weak, and children were summarily executed by the Nazis in these camps, Mrs Birenbaum's survival and coming of age is all the more remarkable. Her story is told with simplicity and clarity and the new edition contains revisions made by the author to the original English translation, and is expanded with a new epilogue and postscripts that bring the story up to date and complete the circle of Mrs Birenbaum's experiences.

The first eye-witness account ever published of life in the Warsaw Ghetto Mary Berg was fifteen when the German army poured into Poland in 1939. She survived four years of Nazi terror, and managed to keep a diary throughout. This astonishing, vivid portrayal of life inside the Warsaw Ghetto ranks with the most significant documents of the Second World War. Mary Berg candidly chronicles not only the daily deprivations and mass deportations, but also the resistance and resilience of the inhabitants, their secret societies, and the youth at the forefront of the fight against Nazi terror. Above all The Diary of Mary Berg is a uniquely personal story of a life-loving girl’s encounter with unparalleled human suffering, and offers an extraordinary insight into one of the darkest chapters of human history.

Why do the vast majority of heroin users live in cities? In his provocative history of heroin in the United States, Eric C. Schneider explains what is distinctively urban about this undisputed king of underworld drugs. During the twentieth century, New York City was the nation's heroin capital—over half of all known addicts lived there, and underworld bosses like Vito Genovese, Nicky Barnes, and Frank Lucas used their international networks to import and distribute the drug to cities throughout the country, generating vast sums of capital in return. Schneider uncovers how New York, as the principal distribution hub, organized the global trade in heroin and sustained the subcultures that supported its use. Through interviews with former junkies and clinic workers and in-depth archival research, Schneider also chronicles the dramatically shifting demographic profile of heroin users. Originally popular among working-class whites in the 1920s, heroin became associated with jazz musicians and Beat writers in the 1940s. Musician Red Rodney called heroin the trademark of the bebop generation. "It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club," he proclaimed. Smack takes readers through the typical haunts of heroin users—52nd Street jazz clubs, Times Square cafeterias, Chicago's South Side street corners—to explain how young people were initiated into the drug culture. Smack recounts the explosion of heroin use among middle-class young people in the 1960s and 1970s. It became the drug of choice among a wide swath of youth, from hippies in Haight-Ashbury and soldiers in Vietnam to punks on the Lower East Side. Panics over the drug led to the passage of increasingly severe legislation that entrapped heroin users in the criminal justice system without addressing the issues that led to its use in the first place. The book ends with a meditation on the evolution of the war on drugs and addresses why efforts to solve the drug problem must go beyond eliminating supply.