Watkins, D. (Dwight)

Summary: "At nine-years-old, D. Watkins has three concerns in life: picking his dad's lotto numbers, keeping his Nikes free of creases, and being a man. Directly in his periphery is east Baltimore, a poverty-stricken city battling the height of a crack epidemic just hours from the nation's capital. Watkins, like many boys around him, is thrust out of childhood and into a world where manhood means...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Legacy Lit 2022

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Coates, Ta-Nehisi

Summary: "A memoir from Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which he details the challenges on the streets and within one's family, especially the eternal struggle for peace between a father and son and the important role family plays in such circumstances"--

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Delacorte Press 2021

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Bowden, Mark

Summary: "In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes readers inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight of its members in prison. Sandtown is one of the deadliest neighborhoods in the world; it earned Baltimore its nickname "Bodymore, Murderland," and was made notorious by...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Atlantic Monthly Press 2023

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Coates, Ta-Nehisi.

Summary: Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons through inner-city adolescence--and...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Spiegel & Grau 2008

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Moore, Wes

Summary: Two kids with the same name were born blocks apart in the same decaying city within a few years of each other. One grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, army officer, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation.

Format: sound recording-nonmusical

Publisher / Publication Date: Random House Audio 2010

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Chaudry, Rabia

Summary: "In early 2000, Adnan Syed was convicted and sentenced to life plus thirty years for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, a high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland. Syed has maintained his innocence, and Rabia Chaudry, a family friend, has always believed him. By 2013, after almost all appeals had been exhausted, Rabia contacted Sarah Koenig, a producer at This American Life, in hopes...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: St. Martin's Press 2016

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Langley, Sharon

Summary: "When Sharon Langley was born, amusement parks were segregated, and African American families were not allowed in. This picture book tells how a community came together--both black and white--to make a change. In the summer of 1963, because of demonstrations and public protests the Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Maryland became desegregated and opened to all for the first time. Sharon and her...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Abrams Books for Young Readers 2020

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Shufelt, Gordon H.

Summary: "In 1875, an Irish-born Baltimore policeman, Patrick McDonald, entered the home of Daniel Brown, an African American laborer, and clubbed and shot Brown, who died within an hour of the attack. In similar cases at the time, authorities routinely exonerated Maryland law enforcement officers who killed African Americans, usually without serious inquiries into the underlying facts. But in this...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: The Kent State University Press 2021

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Bartoletti, Susan Campbell.

Summary: Relates events of the 1814 Battle of Baltimore as seen through the eyes of twelve-year-old Caroline Pickersgill, who had worked with her family and their servants to sew the enormous flag which waved over Fort McHenry.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Houghton Mifflin 2004

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Wallach, Janet

Summary: "The true story of socialite spy Marguerite Harrison, who slipped behind enemy lines in Russia and Germany in the fraught period between the world wars Foreign correspondent. Author. Filmmaker. Spy. Marguerite Harrison was born into Gilded Age American privilege and launched a successful career as a culture writer for the Baltimore Sun as a young widow. But when America entered World War I,...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Doubleday 2023

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Bowden, Mark

Summary: In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang life, Mark Bowden takes readers inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depth portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigation that landed eight of its members in prison.

Format: sound recording-nonmusical

Publisher / Publication Date: 2023

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Phelps, Debbie

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: HarperLuxe 2009

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Simon, David

Summary: At the center of the narrative is fifteen-year-old DeAndre McCullough. DeAndre's parents, Gary and Fran, were once poised, against all odds, to pull themselves up and out of West Baltimore. But when they themselves stumble and then succumb to the corner's temptations, DeAndre's future hangs in the balance. Smart and streetwise, he is both drawn to and wary of the drug trade that flourishes...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Broadway Books 1998

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Fenton, Justin

Summary: "Baltimore, 2015. Riots were erupting across the city as citizens demanded justice for Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year old black man who had died while in police custody. At the same time, drug and violent crime were surging, and that year, Baltimore would reach its deadliest year in over two decades: 342 homicides in a city of six hundred thousand people. Under intense scrutiny--and a federal...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Random House 2021

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Booker, Sheri

Summary: "Six Feet Under" meets The Wire in a dazzling and darkly comic memoir about coming-of-age in a black funeral home in Baltimore. Sheri Booker was only fifteen years old when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea that her summer job would become nine years of immersion in a hidden world. Reeling from the death of her beloved great aunt, she found comfort in...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: 2013

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Lippman, Laura

Summary: Thirty years ago two sisters disappeared from a shopping mall. Their bodies were never found and those familiar with the case have always been tortured by these questions: How do you kidnap two girls? Who--or what--could have lured the two sisters away from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness? Now a clearly disoriented woman involved in a...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: William Morrow 2007

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Watkins, D. (Dwight)

Summary: From the row houses of Baltimore to the stoops of Brooklyn, with searing conviction and full compassion, D. Watkins, New York Times bestselling author of The Cook Up and The Beast Side lays bare the voices of the most vulnerable and allows their raw, intimate stories to uncover the systematic injustice threaded within our society. Honest and eye-opening, We Speak for Ourselves makes us listen,...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Atria Books 2019

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Moore, Wes

Summary: "When Freddie Gray was arrested for possessing an 'illegal knife' in April 2015, he was, by eyewitness accounts that video evidence later confirmed, treated 'roughly' as police loaded him into a vehicle. By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray wasin a coma he would never recover from. In the wake of a long history of police abuse in Baltimore, this killing felt like a final straw--it led...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: One World 2020

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Hogg, Lauren

Summary: Lauren Hogg, one of the survivors of the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland, Florida, dramatically tells her story in graphic novel form. The tragedy of yet another mass shooting has galvanized the young people of the country, and helped launch a movement that continues to gain momentum. Lauren Hogg lost her two best friends that horrible day, but despite her loss she,...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Zuiker Press 2019

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Summary: The 12 O'Clock Boys are a notorious urban dirt bike pack in Baltimore that pops wheelies, weaves at excessive speeds through traffic, and impressively evades the hamstrung police. Their antics are viewed through the eyes of adolescent Taekwon Ford, known as Pug, a bright kid from the Westside obsessed with the riders and willing to do anything to join their ranks.

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: 2014

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Grove, Tim

Summary: Complemented by historical artwork and photos, an account of the lesser-known history of America's national anthem describes the American flag's design, the important contributions of free black soldiers during the War of 1812, and the intense battle that inspired Francis Scott Key's poem.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Abrams Books for Young Readers 2020

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