num_pages: 176
description: A New York Times Best Seller!Searing Dispatches from the Urban Zones Where African American Men Have Become an Endangered SpeciesTo 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 African Americansparticularly young black menare an endangered species.Now the countrys 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 Marylandor Bodymore Murderland as his friends call itsurviving murderous business rivals in the drug trade and equally predatory lawmen. Throughout it all he pursued his education earning a masters degree from Johns Hopkins University while staying rooted in his community.When black residents of Baltimore finally decided they had had enoughafter the brutal killing of twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray while in police custodyWatkins 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.
language: English
title: The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America
publisher: Hot Books