This is a shocking and gripping story of an American GI's six months at the Guantanamo Bay detainee camp where he served as an Arabic translator and took part in the interrogations of the Muslim prisoners.

"An oral history of HBO"s The Wire"--

As recently as the 1970s, many inmates in southern prisons lived and worked on prison farms that were not only modeled after the American slave plantation, but even occupied lands that literally were slave plantations before the Civil War, and on which working and living conditions had not changed much a century after the war. Bruce Jackson began visiting some of these prison farms in the 1960s to study black convict worksongs and folk culture. He took a camera along as means of visual note taking, but soon realized that he had an extraordinary opportunity to document a world whose harshness was so extreme that at least one prison had been declared unconstitutional. Allowed unsupervised access to prison farms in Texas and Arkansas, Jackson created an astonishing photographic record, most of which has never before been published in book form. Inside the Wire presents a complete, irreplaceable portrait of the southern prison farm. With freedom to wander the fields and facilities and hang out with inmates for extended periods, Jackson captured everything from the hot, backbreaking work of hand-picking cotton, to the cacophony and lack of all privacy in the cell blocks, to the grim solitude of death row. He also includes some early twentieth-century prisoner identification shots, taken by anonymous convict photographers for the prison files, that survive as profoundly evocative human portraits. These images and Jackson’s photographs document, as no previous work has, the humanity of the people and the inhumanity of the institutions in which they labor and languish. As Jackson says, “sometimes kindness happens with prison, but prison itself is a cruel world outsiders can scarcely imagine. I hope nothing in this book suggests otherwise.”

An account of the costly 1971 surprise attack on Firebase Mary Ann draws on declassified documents and interviews with more than fifty veterans of the 1st Battalion of the 46th Infantry. Reprint.

Taut, suspenseful and ferociously readable thriller featuring psychological profiler Dr Tony Hill, hero of the hugely succesful television series 'The Wire in the Blood'.

Did Omar Little die of lead poisoning? Would a decriminalization strategy like the one in Hamsterdam end the War on Drugs? What will it take to save neglected kids like Wallace and Dukie? Tapping into 'The Wire' uses the acclaimed television series as a road map for exploring connections between inner-city poverty and drug-related violence. Past Baltimore City health commissioner Peter Beilenson teams up with former Baltimore Sun reporter Patrick A. McGuire to deliver a compelling, highly readable examination of urban policy and public health issues affecting cities across the nation. Each chapter recounts scenes from episodes of the HBO series, placing the characters' challenges into the broader context of public policy. A candid interview with the show’s co-creator David Simon reveals that one of the intentions of the series is to expose gross failures of public institutions, including criminal justice, education, labor, the news media, and city government. Even if readers haven’t seen the series, the book’s detailed summaries of scenes and characters brings them up to speed and engages them in both the story and the issues. With a firm grasp on the hard truths of real-world problems, Tapping into 'The Wire' helps undo misconceptions and encourage a dialogue of understanding. -- John A. Rich, author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men

A riveting collection of thirty-eight narratives by American soldiers serving in Afghanistan, Outside the Wire offers a powerful evocation of everyday life in a war zone. Christine Dumaine Leche--a writing instructor who left her home and family to teach at Bagram Air Base and a forward operating base near the volatile Afghan-Pakistani border--encouraged these deeply personal reflections, which demonstrate the power of writing to battle the most traumatic of experiences. The soldiers whose words fill this book often met for class with Leche under extreme circumstances and in challenging conditions, some having just returned from dangerous combat missions, others having spent the day in firefights, endured hours in the bitter cold of an open guard tower, or suffered a difficult phone conversation with a spouse back home. Some choose to record momentous events from childhood or civilian life--events that motivated them to join the military or that haunt them as adults. Others capture the immediacy of the battlefield and the emotional and psychological explosions that followed. These soldiers write through the senses and from the soul, grappling with the impact of moral complexity, fear, homesickness, boredom, and despair. We each, writes Leche, require witnesses to the narratives of our lives. Outside the Wire creates that opportunity for us as readers to bear witness to the men and women who carry the weight of war for us all.