Front Porches were once the center of activity for families when the weather allowed. With the advent of HVAC, the walls went up, the windows came down and doors closed and an era came to an end. Jack's Shop brings to mind, once again, those days of front porches, outhouses, and country living. Follow the antics and adventures of a young boy growing up in rural Virginia during the1950s and '60s. It may bring to mind a far simpler and, in some ways, misguided period in the history of the south. A bygone era of front porch swings, and the simple pleasures of country living is fondly recalled with a unique sampling of poignant humor. Through his eyes, the serenity and simplicity of the day is continually questioned until finally a life-threatening illness forces him to face a painful reality.

No, no, NO! Geraldine is NOT moving. Not to this new town where she’s the only giraffe. Not to this new school where she has no friends. Not to this new place, where everyone only knows her as That Giraffe Girl. But soon Geraldine meets Cassie, a girl who is just as much of an outcast as she is, and as time goes by, she realizes that being yourself and making one really good, unusual friend can help someone who literally stands out fit right in. Together, Geraldine and Cassie play by their own rules.

Scarlett and Beauregard, pergrine falcons living on the ledge of a Baltimore skyscraper, hatch four chicks. One of the chicks --Perry-- is especially eager to grow up so he can fly from the nest and explore the world around him. Beauregard promises to take Perry on a tour of the city when he is old enough. That day finally comes, and the two birds fly off on their adventure. Perry has a wonderful time seeing Baltimore's sights and learning about the famous and not-so-famous who lived in "Charm City."

This picture book debut from award-winning, "New York Times"-bestselling crime fiction author Lippman offers a timely parable about family values, a little girl, and a dragon. Full color.

Countering the Dickensian stereotypes, Orphanages Reconsidered portrays how three private orphanages in Baltimore responded to the need of poor, single parents for boarding schools for their children. These innovative institutions also served as pivotal community forces, rebuilding families by providing vocational training, keeping siblings together, and encouraging orphans to maintain close ties with relatives.Fastidious research shows how the institutions-Jewish, non-denominational Protestant, and Catholic-differed in their ethnic and religious priorities, their financial support, their staffing, and their relations with the community. Nurith Zmora embellishes her portraits with institutional records, letters from the children, and published autobiographies. Author note: Nurith Zmora is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Delaware.

Content: Before Opie lived in Mayberry, Beaver and Wally in Mayfield, and Betty, Bud and Kathy in Springfield, there were thousands of little Black children experiencing the same quality of life in Cherry Hill, a post WWII planned suburban community containing a public housing project on a southeastern peninsula of Baltimore City. These children had a sense of being loved, being free, being safe, and above all, having the space they needed to stretch out and enjoy small town living. They could play all day with their friends, skate and ride their bikes all over town, and chase the ice cream man's truck, with the admonishment to be home by the time the streetlights came on. The author was one of those children, and she rallied sixty or so of her Cherry Hill contemporaries to share what life was like for them in what they know to be a special place and time.

A volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology West Baltimore stands out in the popular imagination as the quintessential “inner city”—gritty, run-down, and marred by drugs and gang violence. Indeed, with the collapse of manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, the area experienced a rapid onset of poverty and high unemployment, with few public resources available to alleviate economic distress. But in stark contrast to the image of a perpetual “urban underclass” depicted in television by shows like The Wire, sociologists Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson present a more nuanced portrait of Baltimore’s inner city residents that employs important new research on the significance of early-life opportunities available to low-income populations. The Long Shadow focuses on children who grew up in west Baltimore neighborhoods and others like them throughout the city, tracing how their early lives in the inner city have affected their long-term well-being. Although research for this book was conducted in Baltimore, that city’s struggles with deindustrialization, white flight, and concentrated poverty were characteristic of most East Coast and Midwest manufacturing cities. The experience of Baltimore’s children who came of age during this era is mirrored in the experiences of urban children across the nation. For 25 years, the authors of The Long Shadow tracked the life progress of a group of almost 800 predominantly low-income Baltimore school children through the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP). The study monitored the children’s transitions to young adulthood with special attention to how opportunities available to them as early as first grade shaped their socioeconomic status as adults. The authors’ fine-grained analysis confirms that the children who lived in more cohesive neighborhoods, had stronger families, and attended better schools tended to maintain a higher economic status later in life. As young adults, they held higher-income jobs and had achieved more personal milestones (such as marriage) than their lower-status counterparts. Differences in race and gender further stratified life opportunities for the Baltimore children. As one of the first studies to closely examine the outcomes of inner-city whites in addition to African Americans, data from the BSSYP shows that by adulthood, white men of lower status family background, despite attaining less education on average, were more likely to be employed than any other group in part due to family connections and long-standing racial biases in Baltimore’s industrial economy. Gender imbalances were also evident: the women, who were more likely to be working in low-wage service and clerical jobs, earned less than men. African American women were doubly disadvantaged insofar as they were less likely to be in a stable relationship than white women, and therefore less likely to benefit from a second income. Combining original interviews with Baltimore families, teachers, and other community members with the empirical data gathered from the authors’ groundbreaking research, The Long Shadow unravels the complex connections between socioeconomic origins and socioeconomic destinations to reveal a startling and much-needed examination of who succeeds and why.