Richard Ross (10)

Where will you go when the trouble starts? For countless people around the world, the answer is that bomb shelter down in the basement. In fact, people from around the world have been building shelters to protect themselves from catastrophe―natural disaster, war, nuclear events―for centuries. Waiting for the End of the World is photographer Richard Ross's journey into this quirky, somewhat paranoid, and occasionally beautiful underground world. Ross has documented not only the bomb show more shelters of the United States, but also examples from Vietnam, Russia, England, Turkey, and even Switzerland, where citizens are required by law to have a bomb shelter.

Ross's subjects include the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, where a shelter was built to house the entire U.S. Congress, shelters in Beijing, where the Chinese built a complete city underground, and Hittite shelters in Eastern Turkey built some 4,000 years ago. His ethereal images show spaces that at once provide only the barest necessities for survival but maintain a level of idiosyncratic personality that testify to the endurance―and wackiness―of the human spirit. show less

This is a photographic album of kids in different prison systems across the U.S. From the back cover; "The nearly 150 images in this book were made over 5 years of visiting more than 1,000 youth confined in more than 200 juvenile detention institutions in 31 states." What he found was hopeless kids in horrible situations with little chance of improving their situations. One chilling fact given was how much more the city of Oakland spends annually on one incarcerated youth than one student in show more school. His point was made.

Since the individuals are all under age their faces are not shown. If their faces are not cropped out of the picture or blurred, they are frequently covered by the kid's hands or shirt pulled up or covered with sheets. In these cases, the body language of despair, shame, self-disgust, or whatever is enhanced by their effort to hide their identity. Whether done on purpose or not, it is powerful.

This book recently received an Alex Award for an adult book with special appeal to teens. show less

This is an amazing resource. Really well done photographs, great layout, lots of statistics and data presented accessibly.

Also, really hard to read. You should pair it with [b:No Choirboy|3466294|No Choirboy Murder, Violence, and Teenagers on Death Row|Susan Kuklin|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1316739228s/3466294.jpg|3507596] for a period of reading really good and simultaneously awful information about juvenile justice.

They only thing they could have added would have been a glossary like show more this one: http://www.kalcounty.com/occ/terms.htm show less