Slumming Angels is a detective mystery set in Houston, Texas in the 1990's. The protagonist, Trip Chandler, is a no-nonsense tough guy from the old school. His penchant for finding trouble and attracting beautiful women, coupled with a sharp tongue and quick fists, is a recipe for disaster. In Chandler's maiden voyage, he gets involved with a sixtyish Texas oilman and his drop-dead gorgeous mistress, a blonde nymphomaniac that can reduce the toughest-tough guy, to a flaccid puddle of warm water. This one includes big bucks, quick sex, blackmail, and of course murder.
“A record of how a city of great wealth ignored the desperate poverty at its very heart . . . It is a lesson in the price of capitalism.” —North West Labour History Journal “It is all free fighting here. Even some of the windows do not open, so it is useless to cry for help. Dampness and misery, violence and wrong, have left their handwriting in perfectly legible characters on the walls.” —Manchester Guardian, 1870 Step into the Victorian underworld of Angel Meadow, the vilest and most dangerous slum of the Industrial Revolution. In the shadow of the world’s first cotton mill, 30,000 souls trapped by poverty are fighting for survival as the British Empire is built upon their backs. Thieves and prostitutes keep company with rats in overcrowded lodging houses and deep cellars on the banks of a black river, the Irk. Gangs of “scuttlers” stalk the streets in pointed, brass-tipped clogs. Those who evade their clutches are hunted down by cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis. Lawless drinking dens and a cold slab in the dead house provide the only relief from a filthy and frightening world. In this shocking book, journalist Dean Kirby takes readers on a hair-raising journey through the gin palaces, alleyways and underground vaults of this nineteenth-century Manchester slum considered so diabolical it was re-christened “hell upon earth” by Friedrich Engels. ENTER ANGEL MEADOW IF YOU DARE . . . “In this book the author expertly achieves driving home the grim horror that was Angel Meadow. These were conditions at the bottom of human endurance and conditions that go beyond imaginations of modern-day citizens.” —Crime Traveller
Everybody has two eyes and a nose and a mouth. What makes some people beautiful and some people not? Nikki never imagined that this offhand thought would change the course of her senior year forever. But when she poses the question to her best friends, Alicia and Sam, Alicia is suddenly inspired, and the three unexpectedly find themselves launching a "human experiment." It seems like the perfect way to make a difference in their last few weeks of high school: they will each pick a student who needs a little improving and take that person to the prom. Harmless, right? When Nikki, Alicia, and Sam quickly become entrenched in their projects, each has to face difficult realizations about the people they have chosen -- and themselves. Before long their own close friendship feels fragile. Will they make it to graduation without hurting one another -- or anybody else? Acclaimed author Kristen D. Randle has woven an intriguing, insightful, and suspenseful story about three friends who set out to transform others, with unforeseen consequences.
“An authentic cry of American innocence . . . The author seizes the reader with a Southern gift for storytelling and never lets go.”—Time Magazine It is the mid-1950s in Quarrytown, Georgia. In the slum known as the Ape Yard, hope’s last refuge is a boardinghouse where a handful of residents dream of a better life. Earl Whitaker, who is white, and Tio Grant, who is black, are both teenagers, both orphans, and best friends. In the same house live two of the most important adults in the boys’ lives: Em Jojohn, the gigantic Lumbee Indian handyman, is notorious for his binges, his rat-catching prowess, and his mysterious departures from town. Jayell Crooms, a gifted but rebellious architect, is stuck in a loveless marriage to a conventional woman intent on climbing the social ladder. Crooms’s vision of a new Ape Yard, rebuilt by its own residents, unites the four—and puts them on a collision course with a small-town Machiavelli who rules the community like a feudal lord. Jeff Fields’s exuberantly defined characters and his firmly rooted sense of place have earned A Cry of Angels an intensely loyal following. Its republication, more than three decades since it first appeared, is cause for celebration. “A humdinger . . . even better than To Kill a Mockingbird . . . funny, touching, and gripping.”—Chicago Daily News “Heartwarming . . . We find ourselves wondering why delightful novels like this aren’t written anymore, and grateful that this one has come along to fill the void.”—The New York Times “A flooded-with-life novel with a story to tell and characters to be cherished.”—Boston Sunday Globe
In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, powerfully shaped both Victorian and twentieth-century understandings of poverty and social welfare, gender relations, and sexuality. The slums of late-Victorian London became synonymous with all that was wrong with industrial capitalist society. But for philanthropic men and women eager to free themselves from the starched conventions of bourgeois respectability and domesticity, slums were also places of personal liberation and experimentation. Slumming allowed them to act on their irresistible "attraction of repulsion" for the poor and permitted them, with society's approval, to get dirty and express their own "dirty" desires for intimacy with slum dwellers and, sometimes, with one another. Slumming elucidates the histories of a wide range of preoccupations about poverty and urban life, altruism and sexuality that remain central in Anglo-American culture, including the ethics of undercover investigative reporting, the connections between cross-class sympathy and same-sex desire, and the intermingling of the wish to rescue the poor with the impulse to eroticize and sexually exploit them. By revealing the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories overflowed their boundaries and transformed one another, Koven recaptures the ethical dilemmas that men and women confronted--and continue to confront--in trying to "love thy neighbor as thyself."
Slum Heaven Gamblers is an exaggerated portrayal of life in a poverty-stricken slum and township plagued with gang thrills and community uproars in which a teenage girl narrates her journey of self-discovery surrounded by her internal conflicts and unweaving faith in righteousness, condemnation of sin and belief which is tested and defied by experiences. In abusive relationships, she finds comfort and wonders off to psychologically battle the good that is done for and to her. During her journey, she loses her innocence, and she battles with herself as a teenager in prime puberty state in gang violence and young first-time love ecstasies. The story sheds light on religious beliefs, the struggle to survive growth through the demand for age maturity, moral deprivation, and faith in God and gods. Lungile Lubuzo was born in the townships of the city of Durban, South Africa on the 10th of May 1993. The only surviving child of late mother Duduzile Patience Mhongo and father Michael Lubuzo raised by stepmother Monica Thobeka Lubuzo. A heritage of Zulu and Xhosa dynasties is her cultural inheritance. Official records of her education began in 2001 at Nobuhle International Primary school which is where the excessive hoppy of writing descriptive poetry began and later on graduated in Bachelor of Social work in the summer of 2018 at the University of South Africa. Besides creative writing she also enjoys creative arts and farming. Slum Heaven Gamblers is her first published book.
A few crazy nights of bar hopping The ashes of a long lost friend And Mike still has to go to work the next day! Legal clerk Mike comes to a realization that his life of sex, drugs, and rock n roll are coming to an end. His job is just a paycheck, and the endless nights of shots and sex must end. It all comes to a head when a long lost friend's ashes turn up on his doorstep, along with the unfinished manuscript they were working on together. With one last kick at the can, Mike takes his friend out on the town for one last run at binge drinking and bar hopping. Along the way, he gains self-realization. And with the end of the self-discovery journey, he decides to take that dangerous step into the unknown. His future is not yet written. And he wants to change the narrative. One crazy night after another brings Mike full circle. And everywhere he looks, there is a girl behind the glass smiling at him.
Did advocates of the social gospel carry the burden of humanitarian aid during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Were evangelicals content merely to maintain the status quo and avoid ameliorating the plight of the needy? Focusing upon the period from the Civil War to about 1920, this study attempts to portray the sizeable body of Christians whose extensive welfare activities and concern sprang similarly from their passion for evangelism and personal holiness, writes the author. He meticulously traces the urban welfare activities of the Salvation Army, the Volunteers of America, the Christian Missionary and Alliance, multiple rescue missions and homes, and the religious journal 'Christian Herald'.
INTRODUCTORY SECTION, PAGE 1 INTRODUCTORY SECTION, PAGE 1 We embrace the truth of an all-inclusive God and then act as though that God never hit the streets. This is a devotional for those who know better. Hope lives, in all places and at all times. These dialogues are unsettling by design. They are the stories of slumming angels, lost for a time, but able to find their way back. They highlight moments when God pulls up a chair beside those who are most in need. This devotional uses strong language and paints graphic scenes. It offers a point of contact for Christians who rebel against the church that cannot offer itself to all without judgement. It speaks to those whose lives, or the lives of those they love, have been so deeply damaged and scarred.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the 1990s, Los Angeles was home to numerous radical social and environmental eruptions. In the face of several major earthquakes and floods, riots and economic insecurity, police brutality and mass incarceration, some young black Angelenos turned to holy hip hop—a movement merging Christianity and hip hop culture—to “save” themselves and the city. Converting street corners to open-air churches and gangsta rap beats into anthems of praise, holy hip hoppers used gospel rap to navigate complicated social and spiritual realities and to transform the Southland’s fractured terrains into musical Zions. Armed with beats, rhymes, and bibles, they journeyed through black Lutheran congregations, prison ministries, African churches, reggae dancehalls, hip hop clubs, Nation of Islam meetings, and Black Lives Matter marches. Zanfagna’s fascinating ethnography provides a contemporary and unique view of black LA, offering a much-needed perspective on how music and religion intertwine in people's everyday experiences.
