NCW Libraries

"New Jack City meets Serpico in this provocative memoir of a crack dealer-turned-decorated NYPD officer--a timely reflection on the complex relationship between the police and the communities they are meant to protect. Corey Pegues has lived on both sides of the law. At the height of the 1980s crack epidemic, he was a teenager hugging the street corner, selling dope for the notorious Supreme Team gang and watching drugs decimate his stable, working-class...

Built in the 1960s, Cidade de Deus (City of God) is a sprawling housing project built to keep the poor as far as possible from Rio's glamorous beaches and resorts. By the 1980s, it has degenerated into a war zone so dangerous that visitors from outside risk being shot to death on sight, a poisonous stew of poverty, drugs, and crime. "If you run away, they get you, and if you stay, they get you, too," says Rocket, who wants to be a photographer. Rocket's...

"On the mean streets on New York's Lower East Side, Drina hopes to save her brother from a life of crime. But notorious hoodlum Baby Face Martin has come back to his old haunts looking for trouble and threatening to drag the boy down with him. Drina turns to her childhood friend Dave for help. But can he stop Martin without becoming just like him?"--Container.

"Jinju is bad. She smokes, drinks, runs away from home, and has no qualms about making her parents worry. Her mother and sister beg her to be a better student, sister, daughter; her beleaguered father expresses his concerns with his fists. Bad Friends is set in the 1990s in a South Korea torn between tradition and Western modernity and haunted by an air of generalized gloom. Cycles of abuse abound as the characters enact violence within their power...

From Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock. Father Greg Boyle, a white Jesuit priest, has spent some 25 years in the toughest part of East LA, offering jobs not jail, to tough, street-smart, and amazingly sweet young people, all former gang members. Father Boyle is a charismatic visionary, but he's made the dream real: his Homeboy Industries has become the largest, most successful gang intervention and rehab program in the U.S. and an inspiration...

When an ex-Marine becomes a high school teacher, she is assigned to a tough class of inner-city teenagers.

Haunted by the event that sentences him to time in a group home, Miguel breaks out with two unlikely companions and together they begin their journey down the California coast hoping to get to Mexico and a new life.

When thirteen-year-old Nick is framed for a jewel robbery, he and his brother, the bumbling detective Tim Diamond, attempt to clear his name by capturing the master criminal known as the Fence. Thirteen-year-old Nick Diamond is in prison! Framed for a jewel heist, quick-thinking Nick finds himself sharing a cell with public enemy number one: Johnny Powers. Nick's only chance of clearing his name is to nail the Fence, the country's master criminal....