For the young men of Dunbar—the low-income, historically segregated neighborhoods of Fort Myers, Florida—avoiding the path that leads to easy money as a drug dealer often means choosing complete devotion to football and dreams of NFL stardom. While such dreams remain out of reach for most, an astonishing number of Dunbar athletes, including NFL idols Deion Sanders, Jevon Kearse, and Earnest Graham, have achieved massive success. Fourth Down in Dunbar is the story of how one community, plagued by drugs and violence, where many children are fatherless, gave rise to so many stellar youth athletes. Using Sanders as the centerpiece of the story, David Dorsey explores Dunbar’s history to show how the same drug culture that ruined so many promising futures also served as motivation for football success. As a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press, Dorsey had exclusive access to the players and their relatives. He shows the success of the wildly talented as well as the regrets of those who took the wrong path, while highlighting hope for the future of Dunbar. In this poignant tale of heartbreak and triumph, Dorsey reveals the true nature of these men who overcame the obstacles in their lives and made their families and their hometown proud.

Hey, Kitty Slade here, just checking in again. I was getting pretty used to seeing, you know, dead people - but they can still take a girl by surprise. This one - this one was weird. When Kitty goes to stay on an eerie, windswept moor, she soon hears about a terrifying ghost hound rumoured to prey on humans. A man has disappeared without a trace - and he's not the first. Helped by a strange spirit called Lupa, Kitty must solve the mystery - and fast...

A classic in contemporary Oklahoma literature, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Red Dirt unearths the joys and ordeals of growing up poor during the 1940s and 1950s. In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era, the author bears witness to a family and community that still cling to the dream of America as a republic of landowners.

Combining a fascinating history of the first U.S. high school for African Americans with an unflinching analysis of urban public-school education today, First Class explores an underrepresented and largely unknown aspect of black history while opening a discussion on what it takes to make a public school successful. In 1870, in the wake of the Civil War, citizens of Washington, DC, opened the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, the first black public high school in the United States; it would later be renamed Dunbar High and would flourish despite Jim Crow laws and segregation. Dunbar attracted an extraordinary faculty: its early principal was the first black graduate of Harvard, and at a time it had seven teachers with PhDs, a medical doctor, and a lawyer. During the school's first 80 years, these teachers would develop generations of highly educated, successful African Americans, and at its height in the 1940s and '50s, Dunbar High School sent 80 percent of its students to college. Today, as in too many failing urban public schools, the majority of Dunbar students are barely proficient in reading and math. Journalist and author Alison Stewart—whose parents were both Dunbar graduates—tells the story of the school's rise, fall, and possible resurgence as it looks to reopen its new, state-of-the-art campus in the fall of 2013.

Personal experiences mold our characters and shape our futures in myriad ways, and the people we have the gift of meeting along the way affect us forever. In this book, William G. ¿Billy¿ Coward tells his life¿s story through his involvement in sports over more than seven decades. From his beginning as a young African-American man growing up in Washington, DC prior to racial integration to his later successes as an athlete and coach in an ever-changing country, Coward¿s ability to encourage driven people to achieve their potentials sets him apart from the average man. Through this detailed account of his life before and through high-school sports, as a batboy for a Negro League baseball team, a lifeguard at several pools throughout his life, a competitive college athlete in multiple sports, and later as a coach for countless teams and an adult athlete himself, Coward never falters in his constant goal of success, cooperation, and respect of all people. Acknowledging the achievements of the athletes he has known throughout his life, we see just how fortunate and determined Coach Coward has been.

What makes us human? How did we develop language, thought and culture? Why did we survive, and other human species fail? The past 12,000 years represent the only time in the sweep of human history when there has been only one human species. How did this extraordinary proliferation of species come about - and then go extinct? And why did we emerge such intellectual giants? The tale of our origins has inevitably been told through the 'stones and bones' of the archaeological record, yet Robin Dunbar shows it was our social and cognitive changes rather than our physical development which truly made us distinct from other species.