The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America - Hardcover

Watkins, D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1510703357 ISBN 13: 9781510703353

Publisher: Hot Books, 2015

Synopsis

A New York Times Best Seller!

Searing Dispatches from the Urban Zones Where African American Men Have Become an Endangered Species

To many in the age of Obama, America had succeeded in going beyond race,” putting the divisions of the past behind us. And then seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and then Baltimore blew up; and then gunfire shattered a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly the entire country awakened to a stark fact: African Americans particularly young black men are an endangered species.

Now the country’s urban war zone is brought powerfully to life by a rising young literary talent, D. Watkins. The author fought his way up on the east side (the beast side”) of Baltimore, Maryland or Bodymore, Murderland,” as his friends call it surviving murderous business rivals in the drug trade and equally predatory lawmen. Throughout it all, he pursued his education, earning a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University, while staying rooted in his community.

When black residents of Baltimore finally decided they had had enough after the brutal killing of twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray while in police custody Watkins was on the streets when the city erupted. He writes about his bleeding hometown with the razor-sharp insights of someone who bleeds along with it. Here are true dispatches from the other side of America.

About this title

From the Author

D Watkins is a columnist for Salon. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Guardian, and magazines, and he is a frequent commentator on NPR, CNN, and elsewhere. He holds a master’s in education from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Baltimore and teaches writing at Coppin State University in Baltimore. He was the winner of Baltimore magazine’s Best Writer” award in 2015.

About the Author

David Talbot is the New York Times bestselling author of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and The Devil’s Chessboard. He is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Salon and has written for the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Time. He lives in San Francisco.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hot Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1510703357
• ISBN 13: 9781510703353
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176