{"title":"Laurence Ralph","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"renegade-dreams-book-laurence-ralph-9780226032719","title":"Renegade Dreams","description":"Every morning Chicagoans wake up to stark headlines that read like some macabre score: \"13 shot, 4 dead overnight across the city,\" and nearly every morning the same elision occurs: what of the nine other victims? As with war, much of our focus on inner-city violence is on the death toll, but the reality is that far more victims live to see another day and must cope with their injuries - both physical and psychological - for the rest of their lives. Renegade Dreams is their story. Walking the streets of one of Chicago's most violent neighborhoods - where the local gang has been active for more than fifty years - Laurence Ralph talks with people whose lives are irrecoverably damaged, seeking to understand how they cope and how they can be helped. Going deep into a West Side neighborhood most Chicagoans only known from news reports - a place where children have been short just for crossing the wrong street - Ralph unearths the fragile humanity that fights to stay alive there, to thrive, against all odds. He talks to mothers, grandmothers, and pastors, to activists and gang leaders, to the maimed and the hopeful, to aspiring rappers, athletes, or those who simply want safe passage to school or a steady job. Gangland Chicago, he shows, is as complicated as ever. It's not just a war zone but a community, a place where people's dreams are projected against the backdrop of unemployment, dilapidated housing, incarceration, addiction, and disease, the many hallmarks of urban poverty that harden like so many scars in their lives. Recounting their stories, he wrestles with what it means to be an outsider in a place like this and whether his attempt to understand, to help, might not in fact inflict its own damage. Ultimately he shows that the many injuries these people carry - like dreams - are a crucial form of resilience, and that we should all think about the ghetto differently, not as an abandoned island of unmitigated violence and helpless victims but as a neighborhood, full of homes, as a part of the larger society in which we all live, together, among one another.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49676673581329,"sku":"CIN022603271XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49683636683025,"sku":"CIN022603271XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000243618065,"sku":"NIN9780226032719","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51394476146961,"sku":"GOR011433570","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022603271X.jpg?v=1751070142"},{"product_id":"torture-letters-book-laurence-ralph-9780226650098","title":"The Torture Letters","description":"Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens--and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander John Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square \"black site\" show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Chicago residents.    In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public's complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protestors, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge's Area Two and follows the city's networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay--Ralph's story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protestors, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it.    With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us--and lending a voice to those long deceased.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49731255337233,"sku":"NGR9780226650098","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49758362140945,"sku":"CIN022665009XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50256872767761,"sku":"CIN022665009XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50953458286865,"sku":"GOR014143449","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000265900305,"sku":"NIN9780226650098","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52858780385553,"sku":"GOR011354048","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022665009X.jpg?v=1750738144"},{"product_id":"sito-book-laurence-ralph-9781538740323","title":"Sito","description":"\u003cb\u003eAN \u003ci\u003eIN THE MARGINS\u003c\/i\u003e BOOK AWARD HONORARY TITLE \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e WINNER OF THE SOCIETY FOR ANTHROPOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICA'S 2025 DELMOS JONES AND JAGNA SHARR MEMORIAL BOOK PRIZE\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e WINNER OF THE COUNCIL OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION'S 2025 OUTSTANDING BOOK AWARD\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e A \"profound\", heart-wrenching story of violence, grief, and the American justice system, explored through the story of one teenager (Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of \u003ci\u003eEvicted\u003c\/i\u003e).\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez--known as Sito-- was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito's. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on. 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