Two kids with the same name were born blocks apart in the same decaying city within a few years of each other. One grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, army officer, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation.

When Jackson accepted a new teaching job in Baltimore in 2016, he searched for schools for his son and bought a house. Here he describes his struggle to make a home in the city that had just been convulsed by the uprising that followed the murder of Freddie Gray. His neighborhood was largely white, and built on racial covenants. His essays examine a personal, spiritual, and civil history that captures the absurdity of American life. - adapted from...

"After going viral "reading" the chaotic political news, having one-too-many awkward social encounters, and coming to terms with his intersecting identities, R. Eric Thomas is ready to live his best life. Or, if not, at least his best-ish life. Now, in this collection of insightful and hilarious essays, Eric finds himself doing things completely out of character, starting with moving back to his perpetually misunderstood hometown of Baltimore. They...

A memoir by the late Congressman details how his experiences as a sharecroppers' son in volatile South Baltimore shaped his life in activism, explaining how government oversight can become a positive part of a just American collective.

The remarkable life of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, renowned as the most beautiful woman of nineteenth-century Baltimore, whose marriage in 1803 to Jérôme Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, became inextricably bound to the diplomatic and political histories of the United States, France, and England.

"The Baltimore Book of the Dead [is] another collection of portraits of the dead, their compressed narratives weaving an unusual, richly populated memoir. Approaching mourning and memory with great care and an eye for the idiosyncratic, the story begins in the 1960s in the author's native New Jersey, moves through Austin, Texas and rural Pennsylvania, and settles in her current home of Baltimore. Winik begins with a portrait of her mother, The Alpha....