Walter Dean Myers
2) Hoops
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A teenage basketball player from Harlem is befriended by a former professional player who, after being forced to quit because of a point shaving scandal, hopes to prevent other young athletes from repeating his mistake.
3) Slam!
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Sixteen-year-old "Slam" Harris is counting on his noteworthy basketball talents to get him out of the inner city and give him a chance to succeed in life, but his coach sees things differently.
4) Scorpions
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After reluctantly taking on the leadership of the Harlem gang, the Scorpions, Jamal finds that his enemies treat him with respect when he acquires a gun--until a tragedy occurs.
5) Game
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If Harlem high school senior Drew Lawson is going to realize his dream of playing college, then professional, basketball, he will have to improve at being coached and being a team player, especially after a new--white--student threatens to take the scouts' attention away from him.
6) Shooter
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Teachers, therapists, law enforcement officials, and others try to piece together the facts in the aftermath of a tragedy in which Len, a high school senior fed up with being bullied, shoots and kills a football hero and then commits suicide.
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"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." This was one of the most famous catch-phrases of boxing legend Muhammad Ali. Rising from poverty-stricken Louisville in the 1950s he became one of the world's greatest athletes. Beginning life as Cassius Clay, Ali would struggle against opponents both in and out of the ring. Segregation and racism stood as obstacles in his path, but as he climbed the boxing ranks, his social conscience grew. He refused to...
10) Fallen angels
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Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.
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Frederick Douglass was a self-educated slave in the South who grew up to become an icon. He was a leader of the abolitionist movement, a celebrated writer, an esteemed speaker, and a social reformer, proving that, as he said, "Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."
12) Lockdown
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Teenage Reese, serving time at a juvenile detention facility, gets a lesson in making it through hard times from an unlikely friend with a harrowing past.
13) Monster
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While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.
14) Kick
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Told in their separate voices, thirteen-year-old soccer star Kevin and police sergeant Brown, who knew his father, try to keep Kevin out of juvenile hall after he is arrested on very serious charges.
15) Dope sick
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Seeing no way out of his difficult life in Harlem, seventeen-year-old Jeremy "Lil J" Dance flees into a house after a drug deal goes awry and meets a weird man who shows different turning points in Lil J's life when he could have made better choices.
16) Juba!
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In Five Points, New York, in the 1840s, African American teenager William Henry "Juba" Lane works hard to achieve his dream of becoming a professional dancer but his real break comes when he is invited to perform in England. Based on the life of Master Juba; includes historical note.
17) Invasion!
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Josiah Wedgewood and Marcus Perry were friends in Virginia, but now that they are both involved in the Normandy invasion, the differences in their positions is uncomfortable, for Josiah is a white infantryman and Marcus is a black transport driver, the only role the segregated army will allow him.
18) The Glory Field
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Follows a family's two-hundred year history, from the capture of an African boy in the 1750s through the lives of his descendants, as their dreams and circumstances lead them away from and back to the small plot of land in South Carolina that they call the Glory Field.
