[dark_crystal]

With eyes:
ANOTHER BROOKLYN, by Jacqueline Woodson:

Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them. But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.

With ears:
HARVEST OF EMPIRE, by Juan Gonzales:

Latinos are estimated to become the largest U.S. minority group by 2010, numbering more than 40 million. This spectacular transformation has resulted largely from escalating immigration since the 1960s, profoundly affecting such states as California, New York, Texas, and Florida. González, a columnist at the New York Daily News, addresses this massive demographic shift in his rich, angry, and provocative book. With a combination of history, reportage, cross-disciplinary insights, and old-fashioned leftist outrage, he links U.S. intervention abroad and the tyranny of its unbridled market to the profound transformations at home -- namely, the arrival of millions of Spanish-speaking immigrants. They are the "unexpected harvest" of the "expansion that transformed the entire hemisphere into an economic satellite," he charges. In turn, U.S. policy toward its Latin American population will determine whether domestic tranquillity or interethnic conflict will mark the twenty-first century.