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This Ain't Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South

"Waksman brings a new understanding to familiar material by treating it in an original and stimulating manner. This book tells 'the other side of the story.'"—Philip Auslander, author of Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music "While there are a number of histories of punk and metal and numerous biographies of important bands within each genre, there is no comparable book to This Ain't the Summer of Love. The ultimate contribution the book makes is to provoke the reader into rethinking the ongoing fluid relationship between punk, a music that enjoyed considerable critical support, and metal, a music that has been systematically denigrated by critics. This book is the product of superior scholarship; it truly breaks fresh ground and as such it is an important book that will be regularly cited in future work."—Rob Bowman, Professor of Music at York University and author of Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records "Debunking simplistic assumptions that punk rebelled and heavy metal conformed, Steve Waksman demonstrates with precisely chosen examples that for decades the two shared strategies and concerns. As a result, this important volume is among the first to extend to rock history the same much-needed revisionism that elsewhere has transformed our understanding of minstrelsy, blues, country music, and pop."—Eric Weisbard, author of Use Your Illusion I & II

James Cooley's mother had 10 children by six different fathers. She knew she could not care for all her sons and daughters, living as they did in the projects of Chattanooga, Tennessee. So she sent James and his older brother to live with their aunt and uncle in the tiny farming town of Graham, Alabama. Through humor, wit and engaging storytelling, James Cooley paints a picture about his arrival in that rural town in the deep South and his immediate realization that his life would never be the same again. In vivid detail, Cooley lays out his struggle to adjust from city life to country life and then back again to city life. Along the way, the lessons he learned molded him into a successful member of his community and a proud servant to his country. Now he shares those hard-earned lessons to educate, encourage and enlighten our next generation of leaders and the heroes who are helping them on their journey.

Suddenly able to see demons and the Darkhunters who are dedicated to returning them to their own dimension, fifteen-year-old Clary Fray is drawn into this bizarre world when her mother disappears and Clary herself is almost killed by a monster.

Inner City Struggles tells the hardcore reality of three brothers (C Loc, TJ, and Lil Willie) growing up in these wicked LA streets. The story begins in the summer of 1985 and concludes in the year 2002. This street fiction work of art covers gang life, pimping, gambling, sex, drugs, family values, political issues, and religion. Journey with C Loc, TJ, and Lil Willie as they travel down the bumpy road of life and become men right before your eyes. Roberta the mother of the boys is the glue that keeps the family together. She displays her tough love tactics and strong will perseverance to raise her sons in to model citizens as well as taking care of her ill father. All the highs and the lows will have you glued to your seat in suspense. Welcome to the world of hood life.

While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as "Chocolate City," it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.'s shift to a "post-chocolate" cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street's economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation's capital, how blackness contributes to our understanding of contemporary urbanization, and how it laid an important foundation for how Black people have been thought to exist in cities. Summers also analyzes how blackness—as a representation of diversity—is marketed to sell a progressive, "cool," and authentic experience of being in and moving through an urban center. Using a mix of participant observation, visual and media analysis, interviews, and archival research, Summers shows how blackness has become a prized and lucrative aesthetic that often excludes D.C.'s Black residents.