Straight Outta East Oakland

Straight Outta East Oakland
Author: Harry Louis Williams II
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780978913304

Firstborn Walker is a book worm who dreams of attending one of America's most competitive universities. When his best friend is shot through the forehead with a hollow tip bullet, his desire to flee the mean streets only intensifies. Unemployed, he turns to the only person who can help him secure the money he'll need to supplement his scholarship, a childhood friend known as "Drama." Drama is a charismatic, ultra-violent block hog, an East Oakland crack dealer who makes his living with a triple beam scale and an Uzi submachine gun. So, Firstborn becomes a member of the Black Christmas Mob. Now the community college valedictorian must struggle to survive in a game laced with gold diggers, contract killers, hard hitters, marks, knocks, snitches and infiltrators; a world where witness tampering, blinding violence, safehouses, and a relentless cop named "the Hawk" become his new reality.

Straight Outta East Oakland 2

Straight Outta East Oakland 2
Author: Harry Louis Williams
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: African American youth
ISBN: 9780978913311

Crayon has been recruited by a brutal pimp named Phenomenal.She is 15 years old.Her grandmother knows only person who can save her.That individual is her late daughter Maggys ex-boyfriend, Firstborn. Firstborn has been a year removed from his role as a crack dealer in the bloody streets of East Oakland.He lives a square life in a city where his past remains unknown.Ms. Holmes locates him and pleads with him to come back to Oakland to rescue Crayon.However, the task is easier said than done.Phenomenal is pushing a hard line in the streets.He is a head buster; a drug dealing gun runner with a hand in several illegal enterprises. Firstborn knows of only one person crazy enough to step to Phenomenal.However, he has sworn never to talk to his former best friend Drama again.Can he free Crayon from a living death on the track?Will Firstborn be forced to reunite with the Black Christmas Mob?Will he be dragged down into the depths of hood life never to emerge again?

Theology and California

Theology and California
Author: Fred Sanders
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2016-02-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317011163

Exploring California as a theological place, this book renders critical engagement with significant Californian religious and theological phenomena and the inherent theological impulses within major Californian cultural icons. Harnessing conceptual tools inherent to theology, through theological reflection, assessment, and critique, the chapters in this volume begin to ascertain the significance of various empirical data and that no other qualitative methodological Californian study has done. Many universities are picking up on California literature as a theme that highlights a place of hope, wonder, and cultural innovation, but have neglected the significance of theological instincts flowing through the Californian dynamic. Californians Fred Sanders and Jason Sexton assemble leading voices and specialists both from within and without California for engagement with California’s influential culture: including leading theologians and cultural critics such as Richard J. Mouw, Paul Louis Metzger, and Fred Sanders, alongside leading specialists in Film studies and cultural critique, theological anthropology, missiology, sociology, and history.

Oakland Noir

Oakland Noir
Author: Jerry Thompson
Publisher: Akashic Books
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2017-04-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1617755583

“Wonderfully, in Akashic’s Oakland Noir, the stereotypes about the city suffer the fate of your average noir character—they die brutally.” —San Francisco Chronicle In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir—all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series—comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller (the “Czar of Noir”), this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint. Oakland Noir offers stories by Nick Petrulakis, Kim Addonizio, Keenan Norris, Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder, Katie Gilmartin, Dorothy Lazard, Harry Louis Williams II, Carolyn Alexander, Phil Canalin, Judy Juanita, Jamie DeWolf, Nayomi Munaweera, Mahmud Rahman, Tom McElravey, Joe Loya, and Eddie Muller. “From the Oakland hills to the heart of downtown, each story brings Oakland to life.” —San Jose Mercury News “Oakland is a natural for the series, with its shadowy crimes and disgruntled cops.” —Zoom Street Magazine “San Francisco’s grittier next-door neighbor gets her day in the sun in 16 new stories in this tightly curated entry in Akashic’s Noir series. The hardscrabble streets of Oakland offer crime aplenty . . . Thompson and Muller have taken such pains to choose stories highlighting Oakland’s diversity and history that the result is a volume rich in local culture as well as crime.” —Kirkus Reviews

Welcome to Oakland

Welcome to Oakland
Author: Eric Miles Williamson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2009
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781933293806

The sheer energy and passion and intensity, the linguistic virtuosity of Eric Miles Williamson's latest novel, WELCOME TO OAKLAND, will leave readers breathless. The vigor and uncensored redneck honesty of T-Bird Murphy's blue-collar voice will at turns delight, offend, amuse and enrage readers as T-Bird gives us what we're not supposed to hear: the groans, gritos and war-whoops of men when they're not behaving like gentlemen, when they're out of sight and earshot, when they're wrapped around their drinks at Dick's Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge or your local workingman's watering hole. In WELCOME TO OAKLAND, the T-Bird Murphy of Williamson's internationally acclaimed novel, East Bay Grease, is now a man. He's been divorced twice, and he finds himself hiding out in a garage in rural Missouri for a reason we're never told, confused and stunned, shell-shocked by the hand life has dealt him. He opens his story, "I'm always happiest when I live in a dump, and I've lived in some serious shitholes," but it's difficult to believe him. What unfolds is the story of a workingman who tries his hardest to escape the hell of the Oakland ghetto, who finds honor in squalor, kinship among the broken divorcees of Dick's Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge, dignity and beauty at the garbage dumps where he sleeps in the cab of the scow he drives for a living.

The Black Urban Community

The Black Urban Community
Author: G. Tate
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2019-06-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1349735728

This book explores the many facets of black urban life from its genesis in the 18th century to the present time. With some historical background, the volume is primarily a contemporary critique, focusing on the major themes which have arisen and the challenges the confront African Americans as they create communities: political economy, religion and spirituality, health care, education, protest, and popular culture. The essays all examine the interplay between culture and politics, and the ways in which forms of cultural expression and political participation have changed over the past century to serve the needs of the black urban community. The collection closes with analysis of current struggles these communities face - joblessness, political discontent, frustrations with health care and urban schools - and the ways in which communities are responding to these challenges.

De Facto Feminism

De Facto Feminism
Author: Judy Juanita
Publisher:
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2016-09-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780971635210

In eighteen essays, including a prose poem, Judy Juanita's essay collection excavates the path an East Oakland girl forged over several tumultuous eras to become a novelist, playwright and poet, the de facto feminism that is an intrinsic part of the black struggle and the black community, the equally defiant entrepreneurship in the black community, often in the guise of kitchen beauticians, hair braiders and the Candy Lady in the projects, her own romance with The Gun and violence, her years as a Black Panther Party member and civil rights activist, her history as a domestic in New Jersey and a comic in California. She tops off this buffet with a lengthy, postmodern, spiritual essay written in epistolary form.

The Most Dangerous Man in America

The Most Dangerous Man in America
Author: Bill Minutaglio
Publisher: Twelve
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1455563609

From Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis, authors of the PEN Center USA award-winning Dallas 1963, comes a madcap narrative about Timothy Leary's daring prison escape and run from the law. On the moonlit evening of September 12, 1970, an ex-Harvard professor with a genius I.Q. studies a twelve-foot high fence topped with barbed wire. A few months earlier, Dr. Timothy Leary, the High Priest of LSD, had been running a gleeful campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Now, Leary is six months into a ten-year prison sentence for the crime of possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Aided by the radical Weather Underground, Leary's escape from prison is the counterculture's union of "dope and dynamite," aimed at sparking a revolution and overthrowing the government. Inside the Oval Office, President Richard Nixon drinks his way through sleepless nights as he expands the war in Vietnam and plots to unleash the United States government against his ever-expanding list of domestic enemies. Antiwar demonstrators are massing by the tens of thousands; homemade bombs are exploding everywhere; Black Panther leaders are threatening to burn down the White House; and all the while Nixon obsesses over tracking down Timothy Leary, whom he has branded "the most dangerous man in America." Based on freshly uncovered primary sources and new firsthand interviews, The Most Dangerous Man in America is an American thriller that takes readers along for the gonzo ride of a lifetime. Spanning twenty-eight months, President Nixon's careening, global manhunt for Dr. Timothy Leary winds its way among homegrown radicals, European aristocrats, a Black Panther outpost in Algeria, an international arms dealer, hash-smuggling hippies from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and secret agents on four continents, culminating in one of the trippiest journeys through the American counterculture.

Taking It to the Streets

Taking It to the Streets
Author: Harry Louis Williams II
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2019-07-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0830872655

Reverend Harry "OG Rev." Williams from Oakland, California, is called to the streets: to the hungry, homeless, addicted, incarcerated, and vulnerable. Bringing us face-to-face with both the injustices that plague our cities and the gospel of compassion that offers hope to the downtrodden, this introduction to urban ministry will inspire and equip a new generation to bring the life-giving good news of Jesus to our cities.

Out of Oakland

Out of Oakland
Author: Sean L. Malloy
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501712705

Out of Oakland offers a wonderful case study in the possibilities and limitations of transnational organizing. ― Diplomatic History In Out of Oakland, Sean L. Malloy explores the evolving internationalism of the Black Panther Party (BPP); the continuing exile of former members, including Assata Shakur, in Cuba is testament to the lasting nature of the international bonds that were forged during the party's heyday. Founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the BPP began with no more than a dozen members. Focused on local issues, most notably police brutality, the Panthers patrolled their West Oakland neighborhood armed with shotguns and law books. Within a few years, the BPP had expanded its operations into a global confrontation with what Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver dubbed "the international pig power structure." Malloy traces the shifting intersections between the black freedom struggle in the United States, Third World anticolonialism, and the Cold War. By the early 1970s, the Panthers had chapters across the United States as well as an international section headquartered in Algeria and support groups and emulators as far afield as England, India, New Zealand, Israel, and Sweden. The international section served as an official embassy for the BPP and a beacon for American revolutionaries abroad, attracting figures ranging from Black Power skyjackers to fugitive LSD guru Timothy Leary. Engaging directly with the expanding Cold War, BPP representatives cultivated alliances with the governments of Cuba, North Korea, China, North Vietnam, and the People's Republic of the Congo as well as European and Japanese militant groups and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In an epilogue, Malloy directly links the legacy of the BPP to contemporary questions raised by the Black Lives Matter movement.