Walter Dean Myers

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. Lonnie plays basketball in spite of his coach, a has-been named Cal. Followed by The Outside Shot (1987). All eyes are on seventeen-year-old Lonnie Jackson while he practices with his team for a city-wide basketball Tournament of Champions....

Examines the events and people that have shaped America, providing portraits of figures such as Chief Tecumseh, President Abraham Lincoln, and musician Jimi Hendrix, and featuring lyrical, free-verse poetic text.

In 2035, Dahlia Grillo, a sixteen-year-old math whiz, joins with six other American teens traveling to England to meet with groups from around the world in hopes of stopping C8, the companies that control nearly everything for their own benefit.

Friends Zander, Kambui, LaShonda, and Bobbi, caught in the middle of a mock Civil War at DaVinci Academy, learn the true cost of freedom of speech when they use their alternative newspaper, The Cruiser, to try to make peace.

An inspiring biography of Muhammad Ali from the legendary Walter Dean Myers, reissued under Scholastic Focus for a new generation.

From his childhood in the segregated South to his final fight with Parkinson's disease, Muhammad Ali never backed down. He was banned from boxing during his prime because he refused to fight in Vietnam. He became a symbol of the antiwar movement - and a defender of civil rights. As "The Greatest," he was a boxer...

In 1863, fifteen-year-old Claire, the daughter of an Irish mother and a black father, faces ugly truths and great danger when Irish immigrants, enraged by the Civil War and a federal draft, lash out against blacks and wealthy "swells" of New York City.

The author relates his experiences growing up in Harlem, the home of Sugar Ray Robinson and Langston Hughes, in the 1940s and 1950s.

17-year-old Greg "Slam" Harris tells of the year in which he transfers to a magnet school for the arts, a more academically challenging, mostly white school. After being the hot shot star of his Harlem high school team, he has to learn to fit in and be a team player at his new school. He may not be able to do anything about the rest of his life--his relationships with his family and friends, his grandmother's illness, his scholastic difficulties,...

Written in the form of interviews, reports, and journal entries, the story of three troubled teenagers ends in a tragic school shooting. Cameron: "Deep inside, you know that whoever gets up in your face gets there because he knows you're nothing, and he knows that you know it too." Carla: "What I'm trying to do is to get by -- not even get over, just get by." Leonard: "I have bought a gaw-juss weapon. It lies beneath my bed like a secret lover, quiet,...

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.