Nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Ajami is a bold crime drama set on the margins of an Arab ghetto. Working with a cast of non-actors in the real streets of Ajami itself, the film deftly meshes characters and conflicts with unsentimental compassion, uncompromising realism, and harrowing violence.

"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...

Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood twelve years ago. Desperate pleas for help from the child's aunt led investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl, only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home. Now Amanda is sixteen and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing....

"In its early days, rap was understood as the poetry of the "inner city," which usually meant New York. Few expected anything as hard-edged as gangsta rap to emerge from Los Angeles, home of surf and sun. Felicia Viator tells the story of LA's self-styled "ghetto reporters," whose music forced America to see an urban crisis it preferred to ignore"--

This powerful and disturbing book clearly links persistent poverty among blacks in the United States to the unparalleled degree of deliberate segregation they experience in American cities. American Apartheid shows how the black ghetto was created by whites during the first half of the twentieth century in order to isolate growing urban black populations. It goes on to show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation is perpetuated today...

"A comedy, a love story and a cult classic starring a giant singing plant from outer space - what else could it be but Little Shop of Horrors? The 1986 film has a surprisingly complex history; it began as a short story, then became a low-budget film, before turning into an Off-Broadway play, when finally Frank Oz and his team created this quirky, dark screen version. Many fans do not know that this adaptation originally had a far more sinister ending,...