Best Selling Books by Alex Abramovich

**Vulture''s The Best Books of 2016** **Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2016** **featured in NPR''s Guide to 2016''s Great Reads** The powerful account of one writer''s unlikely friendship with his childhood bully, now the president of a motorcycle club in one of America''s most dangerous cities. Once upon a time, Alex Abramovich and Trevor Latham were mortal enemies: miniature outlaws in a Long Island elementary school, perpetually at each other''s throats. Then they lost track of each other. Decades later, when they met again, Abramovich was a writer and Latham had become President of the East Bay Rats, a motorcycle club in Oakland. In 2010, Abramovich moved to California to immerse himself in Latham''s world - one of fight clubs, booze-filled nights, and beat-downs on the city''s streets. But dangerous, dysfunctional Oakland was also becoming one of America''s most rapidly gentrifying cities, and the questions Abramovich had arrived with were thrown into brutal relief: How do we live with the burden of violence? How do we overcome it? Do we overcome it? As Trevor, the Rats, and the city they live in careen between crises and moments of renaissance, Abramovich explores issues of friendship, family, history, and destiny - and looks at what happens when those things fail. Bullies is at once a vivid, visceral narrative of an unusual friendship and an incisive portrait of a beautiful, terrible city.

"Go behind the scenes and be mentored by the best in the business to find out what it''s really like, and what it really takes, to become a social worker"--Jacket.

"As seen on Investigation Discovery''s Murder is forever."

Cinderella Story collects the best work by one of the freshest young voices to have emerged in the (virtual) pages of Feed magazine. Though remarkably varied, each of the fifteen essays here exhibits an abiding concern for how the products of America''s culture industry impact upon real American lives. "Abramovich cares deeply about some things it would be politic not to," Sam Lipsyte writes in his preface, "and dismantles popular lines of thought with no regard to free drinks forsaken. His stubborn course eschews easy categorizations, embraces nuance, paradox, sensation. Indeed, if there could be such a thing, you might call him a Method Critic - the way his felt actuality bleeds into his cultural knowledge."

This dissertation is about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and queer (LGBTQ) youth and the shelter system. This work focuses on the denial of home and safety to queer and trans youth. Over approximately two years, different groups of people came together to discuss what is holding up and sustaining the homophobia and transphobia in the shelter system, how homophobia and transphobia occurs and is managed in the shelter system, and how broader policy issues serve to create oppressive contexts for LGBTQ youth. This is a Critical Action Research study that was informed by Critical Ethnography and Institutional Ethnography. In order to investigate what disjunctures occur for LGBTQ youth in the shelter system and how those disjunctures come about, this dissertation draws upon one-on-one interviews with LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness, shelter Executive Directors, City of Toronto management, and training facilitators; focus groups with frontline shelter staff; and training observations. This study suggests that it is both the excessive bureaucratic regulation and the lack of necessary bureaucratic regulation in highly significant areas, that play a key role in creating the disjunctures that occur for queer and trans youth in the shelter system. This dissertation describes the findings of this study in five major themes, which include: Homophobia and Transphobia in the Shelter System, LGBTQ Youth Invisibility, Inadequate, Invasive and Otherwise Problematic Rules, Lack of Knowledge, and Inconsistent Conformity to Formal Rules. A Digital Storytelling project was created with one youth and was used as a Knowledge Mobilization strategy for this study. The film helped generate extensive media attention and facilitated change in the shelter system, at the City of Toronto, and at a policy level. This research study has made it possible for the voices of LGBTQ homeless youth to be heard in the context of a critical public health and social justice problem. Detailed policy and practice recommendations and changes to the Toronto Shelter Standards are provided at the end of this dissertation and are meant to help Toronto''s shelter system become safe, accessible, and supportive of LGBTQ youth.