Crossing over

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Don Normark

"In 1949, photographer Don Normark walked up into the hills of Los Angeles looking for a good view. Instead, he found Chavez Ravine, a ramshackle Mexican-American neighborhood tucked away in Elysian Park like a "poor man's Shangri-la." Enchanted, he stayed for a year among the wild roses, tin roofs, and wandering goats of this uniquely intact rural community. Accepted by the residents, Normark was able to photograph a life that, though bowed down by poverty, was lived fully, openly, and joyfully. That ended when, in 1950, the residents of Chavez Ravine received letters from the government informing them that they had to leave. Some sold, some were dragged out of their houses kicking and screaming. The emptied houses were razed to make way for the new Dodger Stadium. The past fifty years have not erased the memories of Los Desterrados, the uprooted descendants of Chavez Ravine. After extensive research, Don Normark has tracked them down in order to share his old photographs and to record their poignant reactions. He has captured the images, the stories, and the bittersweet memories of Los Desterrados in this book."--BOOK JACKET.

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Darrell Dawsey

The statistics about young Black men are familiar: Homicide is their number one killer, one fourth are in jail, on parole, or on probation, and their rates of unemployment, teen fatherhood, educational dropout - and death - exceed those of any other demographic group. Moreover, in the public mind, even those who don't bear out the grim statistics have come to embody society's worst pathologies. Yet, when given the opportunity to speak for themselves, they speak of feeling as fearful as they are feared, as threatened as they are threatening. Living to Tell About It is the first book to look beyond statistics and perceptions to the real lives and experiences of most young Black men in America today. Over the course of a year, journalist Darrell Dawsey traveled across the country, listening to a mosaic of young men talk about their childhoods, relationships with parents and women, sexuality, self-respect, spirituality, ambitions, the race that binds them, and the diversity of class, education and geography that distinguishes them. Interweaving interview material with powerful reflections of his own background as a single-parent child of urban America and a young father, Dawsey portrays the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of young Black men in a society in which they have been the targets of disenfranchisement, neglect, racism, and hostility. The result is a compelling portrait of a generation facing the manifold challenges and dilemmas of Black manhood - and living to tell about it.

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Victoria Starr

Few would have believed that Kathy Dawn Lang, a geeky-looking tomboy from the Albertan prairies who once claimed to be the reincarnation of Patsy Cline, would grow up to become an international superstar... until she opened her mouth to sing. Today, the Grammy Award-winning k.d. lang has become one of North America's most important pop icons. Regarded by many as having the finest female voice of her generation, k.d. lang is far more than a great entertainer. She's an iconoclast, a rebel, and an inspiration for millions - a self-proclaimed feminist and "out" lesbian whose look, and mere existence, challenges long-standing conventions regarding music and image, fashion and sexuality, and what it means to be a woman in the nineties. In k.d. lang: all you get is me, Victoria Starr explores the life of the artist who has broken all the rules of pop culture while becoming one of the world's most beloved singers. From the rolling wheat fields of Southern Alberta to the glitz and glam of Hollywood, from the days when she was destined to become an Olympic athlete to the moment she became the first openly lesbian artist to win an American Music Award, k.d. lang: all you get is me traces k.d.'s path from college dropout to pop superstar. Along the way, family, friends, and colleagues share memories of the times that mattered most in her life: how her seemingly perfect childhood was shattered when her father walked out on her family; how she stumbled accidentally into country music; her work with Roy Orbison, Owen Bradley, Anne Murray, and filmmaker Percy Adlon; and the night the most important man in her life, her friend, mentor, and soul mate, Drifter, was brutally murdered in a drunken brawl. k.d. lang: all you get is me combines the personal and the professional as it uncovers k.d.'s deepest emotions, from a commitment to animal rights that threatened to ruin her career, to her coming to terms with a sexuality that made her an unwitting poster girl for the lesbian and gay community. Along the way we discover the inner strength and unwavering vision of an artist determined to make her own wild dreams come true, as she points the way for women, gay people, and anyone else who is struggling to find a place for themselves in this world.

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Naama Sabar

"Under what circumstance would kibbutz-born young people leave a society which symbolizes, more than anything else, the Zionist dream? Naama Sabar explores this question by examining the lives of a group of Israeli emigrants living in Los Angeles in the 1980s and early 1990s. Through extensive interviews in which these "kibbutzniks" share their life stories, she uncovers what pushed them to leave the kibbutz and what pulls them to remain in L.A. The underlying leitmotif is the search for identity under changing conditions."--BOOK JACKET.