FIVE DAYS

An essential exploration of the fraying of the American city - centered around race, immigration, and wealth inequality - from the ground level and at human scale; and where we go from here

In the wake of a long history of economic inequality and racial injustice in Baltimore, the killing of Freddie Gray on April 19, 2015 felt like a final straw--it led to a week of protests and then five days described alternately as a riot or an uprising that set the entire city on edge, and caught the nation's attention.

Wes Moore is one of Baltimore's proudest sons--a Rhodes Scholar, bestselling author, decorated combat veteran, former White House fellow, and CEO of Robin Hood, one of the largest anti-poverty nonprofits in the nation. While attending Gray's funeral, he saw every strata of the city come together: grieving mothers; members of the city's wealthy elite; activists; and the long-suffering citizens of Baltimore--all looking to comfort each other, but also looking for answers.

Moorewho collaborated on the book's reporting with Erica L. Green, a journalist who was part of the award-winning coverage of the events at the Baltimore Sun --tells the story of the Baltimore uprising through his own observations and lifting up the experiences of seven other Baltimoreans whose lives intersected on those five days including Partee, a conflicted black major of the Baltimore Police Department; Jenny, a young white juvenile public defender who's drawn into the violent center of the uprising herself; Tawanda, a young black woman who'd spent years protesting the killing of her own brother by police; and John Angelos, scion of one of the city's most powerful families and owner of the Baltimore Orioles, who has to make choices of conscience he'd never before confronted.

Each shifting point of view contributes to an engrossing, kaleidoscopic account of one of the emblematic and defining moments of our recent history--but through these stories we also see the deeper causes of the events and seeds of hope for how we address them and move forward as a nation.

Wes Moore is the author of THE OTHER WES MOORE (Spiegel & Grau 2010), which has sold over a million copies, and THE WORK (Spiegel & Grau 2015).

Erica Green is a rising star in journalism, part of the Pulitzer-winning team that covered the Baltimore protests for the Baltimore Sun. She currently covers education for The New York Times, where she's written a number of page-one stories.