A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection. A group of young vigilantes roam the streets of Brooklyn solving supernatural crimes. After his mother’s death, Dwayne is forced to uproot himself and move into the home where his mother grew up: a shabby apartment in Brooklyn. When your dad is a police officer, and your brother’s too cool for school, what's an insecure teen supposed to do? Dwayne’s personal problems are cast aside when he joins a new crew of young vigilantes, devoted to solving a series of sinister cases surrounding mysterious monsters that have been wreaking havoc throughout the city. What if all of the Urban Legends we all fear...were real?

A growing inequality in income and wealth marks modern capitalism, and it negatively affects nearly every aspect of our lives, especially those of the working class. It is and will continue to be the central issue of politics in almost every nation on earth. In this book, the author explains inequality in clear, passionate, and intelligent prose: what it is, why it matters, how it affects us, what its underlying causes are, and what we might do about it. This book was written to encourage informed radical action by working people, the unemployed, and the poor, uniquely blending the author's own experiences with his ability to make complex issues comprehensible to a mass audience. This book will be excellent for courses in a variety of disciplines, and it will be useful to activists and the general reading public.

After his mother's death, teen Dwayne is forced to uproot himself and move into the home where his mother grew up: a shabby apartment in Brooklyn. Overshadowed by his socially salient older brother, and pressured by his policeman father, Dwayne often feels out of place, a sentiment that is only intensified in these unfamiliar surroundings. Before too long, however, his personal problems are cast aside when he gets suckered into joining a new crew of young vigilantes, devoted to solving a series of sinister cases surrounding mysterious monsters that have been wreaking havoc throughout the city.

A growing inequality in income and wealth marks modern capitalism, and it negatively affects nearly every aspect of our lives, especially those of the working class. It is and will continue to be the central issue of politics in almost every nation on earth. In this book, the author explains inequality in clear, passionate, and intelligent prose: what it is, why it matters, how it affects us, what its underlying causes are, and what we might do about it. This book was written to encourage informed radical action by working people, the unemployed, and the poor, uniquely blending the author's own experiences with his ability to make complex issues comprehensible to a mass audience. This book will be excellent for courses in a variety of disciplines, and it will be useful to activists and the general reading public.

The economic boom of the 1990s created huge wealth for the bosses, but benefited workers hardly at all. At the same time, the bosses were able to take the political initiative and even the moral high ground, while workers were often divided against each other. This new book by leading labor analyst Michael D. Yates seeks to explain how this happened, and what can be done about it.

Essential to both tasks is "naming the system"the system that ensures that those who do the work do not benefit from the wealth they produce. Yates draws on recent data to show that the growing inequalityglobally, and within the United Statesis a necessary consequence of capitalism, and not an unfortunate side-effect that can be remedied by technical measures. To defend working people against ongoing attackson their working conditions, their living standards, and their future and that of their childrenand to challenge inequality, it is necessary to understand capitalism as a system and for labor to challenge the political dominance of capitalist interests.

Naming the System examines contemporary trends in employment and unemployment, in hours of work, and in the nature of jobs. It shows how working life is being reconfigured today, and how the effects of this are masked by mainstream economic theories. It uses numerous concrete examples to relate larger theoretical issues to everyday experience of the present-day economy. And it sets out the strategic options for organized labor in the current political context, in which the U.S.-led war on terrorism threatens to eclipse the anti-globalization movement.

Three one-act plays by Michael Yates. A REAL CUSHY NUMBER: It's the night shift at a major hospital and the porters sip their hot tea and talk about life as they wait for a patient to die. ALL GOOD MEN: Party conference time - and the sudden death of the prime minister triggers a power struggle as young speech-writer Simon goes to war with ambitious minister Darius and sexy, ruthless power-broker Lady Bridgewater. LUVVIES: A failed playwright and a bit-part actress invite a young couple home for heavy drinking and ritual humiliation - but the tables could be turned "Clever, well-written. The punchy, bitchy dialogue is great fun with an undercurrent of tragedy. It kept me hooked," said the Write Now Liverpool Drama Festival judge.

In these six exciting stories, Branwell, the Bronte boy who ruled an imaginary childhood world, has failed as poet and painter and slips down the road of drink and despair; passionate Alice, searching for a man she can love as she once loved her father, ignores the desperate struggle of her daughter Maudie to make a life of her own; idealistic Mr Berry, trapped in a dead-end job in a failing boys' school, discovers the secret of an illiterate 11-year old, and is forced to re-examine his own life; John Poulson, corrupt Yorkshire architect imprisoned for bribing his way to success, determines to write a book to clear his name and identify the guilty men; simple-minded Mel recalls his best pal Adrian, killed in an accident, but fails to grasp the relationship between Adrian and his own wife Beatrice; and 50 years ago in Dallas, John F Kennedy narrowly escapes an assassin's bullet - and goes on to change the course of history.

Three one-act plays by Michael Yates. LIFE SENTENCE: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned - especially when she has a meat cleaver in her hand A dark comedy about the violent games lovers play. Winner of the Stanley Arnold Trophy at Sheffield One-Act Play Festival. TILL MY EYES BLEED: Loyal Mel hires the theatre to host a wake for his best friend Adrian. But it becomes apparent - to everyone except Mel - that Mel's wife had enjoyed a passionate affair with Adrian. Will Mel guess the truth before the end of the night? SUNDAY AFTERNOON AGAIN: Eight-year-old Lenny has two big worries: His mum and dad are always fighting, and there's a wicked witch living next door A poignant play about growing up, chosen for Liverpool's Write Now One-Act Play Festival, and described by critic Laurence Raw as "sharply observed... vividly demonstrates how the past exerts a powerful influence over the present."

In this play, young Branwell Bronte, who once ruled an imaginary world, is now a man, grown mad trying to cope with the real one. Having failed as a poet and painter, as doomed in love as he is in literature, he slips ever more quickly down the road of drink, drugs and despair. His loving father Patrick and talented sister Charlotte fight a last-ditch stand for his salvation, but it is Branwell's sinister friend, gravedigger John Brown, who threatens to have the last word in this ultimately terrifying take on the brilliant family we have read so much about and all thought we knew so well.

""A poet of the everyday world, he is consistently good"" says Brian Patten. ""I like the humanity, the way his poems seem to be full of real people feeling real emotions"" says Ian McMillan ""He has an ear for popular diction reminiscent of Alan Bennett. His eye for comic fiction reminds me of Roger McGough"" - Bradford Telegraph & Argus

"When Yates and I first met and had dinner at the University of Missouri, he was an undergraduate. His work was brilliant then. This I told him and his department head. This Canticle for Electronic Music underscores the acuity of my forecasting."-W.H. Auden, The Quest "With great admiration for your work."--Joyce Carol Oates "I appreciate this poet's concentration, swiftness, density: his choice for the deeply personal utterance and that only. He wastes no time with exercises, set themes, and other conventional maneuvers."-Henry Rago, editor, Poetry. "He is violent and unpredictable.has a wild, unconventional imagination."-James Dickey "Dangerous minds investigate dangerous places in the mind. Most of your work lives in these places."-Yehuda Amichai. "J. Michael Yates is the most lively and original writer of his generation."-Robin Skelton "I appreciate your keeping me out of trouble almost as much as I appreciate your poetry." -Czeslaw Milosz. "This young writer, unlike most, is fearless in matters of dangerous themes and dialogue which will clearly come over the lights."-Arthur Miller (as judge of Yates'Major Hopwood Award winning manuscript, Subjunction.) "Michael Yates is a great poet who has given us such a universe. I consider his The Great Bear Lake Meditations to be by far the most ambitious and successful meditative poem ever written in Canada."-Fred Cogswell

"When Yates and I first met and had dinner at the University of Missouri, he was an undergraduate. His work was brilliant then. This I told him and his department head. This Canticle for Electronic Music underscores the acuity of my forecasting."-W.H. Auden, The Quest "With great admiration for your work."--Joyce Carol Oates "I appreciate this poet's concentration, swiftness, density: his choice for the deeply personal utterance and that only. He wastes no time with exercises, set themes, and other conventional maneuvers."-Henry Rago, editor, Poetry. "He is violent and unpredictable.has a wild, unconventional imagination."-James Dickey "Dangerous minds investigate dangerous places in the mind. Most of your work lives in these places."-Yehuda Amichai. "J. Michael Yates is the most lively and original writer of his generation."-Robin Skelton "I appreciate your keeping me out of trouble almost as much as I appreciate your poetry." -Czeslaw Milosz. "This young writer, unlike most, is fearless in matters of dangerous themes and dialogue which will clearly come over the lights."-Arthur Miller (as judge of Yates'Major Hopwood Award winning manuscript, Subjunction.) "Michael Yates is a great poet who has given us such a universe. I consider his The Great Bear Lake Meditations to be by far the most ambitious and successful meditative poem ever written in Canada."-Fred Cogswell

Big changes in the global economy and world politics have put new questions on the table for labour movements around the world. Can workers regain the initiative against the tidal wave of corporate downsizing and government cutbacks? Is labour rising from the ashes? Focusing upon recent developments in the United States, this volume sets these decisive questions about labour against a global backdrop, connecting and contrasting the new American scene to recent developments abroad - from Mexico to Asia, from Canada to Eastern Europe. It provides analysis of the key issues being debated by labour scholars and activists: the changing composition of the international working class; patterns of work under contemporary capitalism; the relationship of race and gender to class; the promise and limitations of recent eruptions of labour militancy; and the strategic options available to the labour movement in today's conditions.