Four friends--Keith, who is searching for the perfect man; Tommie, who is in love with a college basketball player; Marco Antonio, whose perfect relationship is threatened by the demands of Hollywood; and Rafael, who must always be the center of attention--search for true love in L.A. Original.

Lawrence Anthony Ray, a.k.a. L. A. Ray, is or was your average kid growing up in the South. His grandfather was a Baptist preacher. His father was a Baptist preacher. He has two brothers who are Baptist preachers and two nephews who are Baptist preachers, and everybody and their mama thought and expected that he would be the next preacher in the Ray family. To everyone's surprise, at the age of eighteen, he joined the United States Army. His intentions were to get away from his strong Christian upbringing and everyone's expectations of what and who they wanted him to be and go find out for himself who and what he wanted to be. He was taught that God has a plan for everyone's life, and he was on a mission to find out what was God's plan for his life as he hoped and prayed daily it was not to be a preacher.

The updated edition of Steal This Vote—a rollicking history of US voter suppression and fraud from Jacksonian democracy to Citizens United and beyond. In Down for the Count, award-winning journalist Andrew Gumbel explores the tawdry history of elections in the United States. From Jim Crow to Tammany Hall to the Bush v. Gore Florida recount, it is a chronicle of votes bought, stolen, suppressed, lost, miscounted, thrown into rivers, and litigated up to the Supreme Court. Gumbel then uses this history to explain why America is now experiencing the biggest backslide in voting rights in more than a century. First published in 2005 as Steal This Vote, this thoroughly revised and updated edition reveals why America faces so much trouble running clean, transparent elections. And it demonstrates how the partisan battles now raging over voter IDs, campaign spending, and minority voting rights fit into a long, largely unspoken tradition of hostility to the very notion of representative democracy. Interviewing Democrats, Republicans, and a range of voting rights activists, Gumbel offers an engaging and accessible analysis of how our democratic integrity is so often corrupted by racism, money, and power. In an age of high-stakes electoral combat, billionaire-backed candidacies, and bottom-of-the-barrel campaigning, this book is more important than ever. “In a riveting and frightening account, Gumbel . . . traces election fraud in America from the 18th century to the present . . . [the issues he] so winningly addresses are crucial to the future of democracy.” —Publishers Weekly, on Steal This Vote

What is hidden in the taste of a madeleine - or in snatches of Bob Dylan songs, operatic arias, and the remembered sting of a rattan cane? An exploration of memory, Going Down for Air artfully combines two very different yet connected texts. A Memoir is richly evocative not only of times past, but also of a very English, imperial, queerly masculine subjectivity, caught on the cusp of the extinction of the world in and of which it made sense. Derek Sayer's allusive writing succeeds as few have done before in capturing the leaps and bounds of memory itself. Rich in its detail, unstinting in its honesty, this beautifully written memoir is a considerable literary achievement. The memoir is complemented by Sayer's provocative theoretical essay on memory and social identity. Drawing on linguistic and psychoanalytic theory, photographic images, and literary texts, In Search of a Subject argues that it is memory above all that maintains the imagined identities upon which society rests. Going Down for Air is a bold and strikingly successful literary and sociological experiment, which makes a major contribution to understanding how our memories work - and gives them social meaning far beyond

Examines all aspects of establishing prison library service, describing process models and procedures that can result in overcoming negative sentiment. Includes examples of prison library regulation, state prison library standards, recommended readings, and a list of advocacy organizations. An outline of a clerical training program for inmate assistants and a user satisfaction survey are also included.

After his boyfriend cheats on him with a woman, thirty-three-year-old university administrator Kenny Kane, against his better judgment, engages in a wild affair with a young Latino man who shows him what it feels like to be young again. Original.