"The Riot Inside Me finds the author at the bloody crossroads where art and politics, the personal and the political, and Southern California and the wider world meet and trade blows before resuming their separate paths. The twenty-five items gathered here - a "hopscotch" of essays, memoirs, interviews, journal entries, letters, and reports - are divided into four sections. One collects intimate autobiographical pieces, including a moving portrait of her late first husband, a moth drawn to the flames of the more extreme forms of '60s radicalism. Another is reserved for polemics, mainly issues of Black, White, Brown, and Yellow. A third reprints Coleman's infamous "bad" review of Maya Angelou's A Song Flung Up to Heaven - "the most controversial piece I've written" - and a caustically funny report on its fallout. The book concludes with a group of essays on racial violence, poetry and the post-9/11 mindset, topical pieces that are sardonic when it comes to politics and groups but, like all of Coleman's writing, tender and hopeful when it comes to individuals."--BOOK JACKET.

THERE ARE COPS AND THEN THERE ARE REAL COPS, THE ONES WHO WORK THE STREETS EVERY DAY. THEY ARE THE WARRIORS OF TODAY, RISKING THEIR LIVES AND TAKING THE CHANCES. COME ALONG WITH D. E. GRAY AS HE RIDES HIS POLICE MOTORCYCLE THROUGH THE MEAN STREETS OF L.A. AND THEN TRADES IT IN FOR A PATROL CAR IN THE CITY OF ESCONDIDO. TWO DEPARTMENTS VERY MUCH ALIKE BUT AT THE SAME TIME VERY DIFFERENT.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.