The Shape I'm In: The Camel City Dispatches

Time to come back home and rumble in the alley. Shape I’m In: the Camel City Dispatches, is journalist Chad Nance’s second book, taking him off the highways of America and back to the streets, roads and back alleys of his hometown, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Shape I’m In reads like a raw feed out of a working journalist’s notebook covering politics, crime, poverty, homelessness and the big dreams of a small city in a historical period of transition. Recovering from the economic brutalities of globalization, Winston-Salem once more finds itself on the cutting edge of innovation and technology while on her streets 1 in 6 people still struggle to find enough food to eat every day. Shape I’m In offers an unflinching look at the good and the bad, the bloody, the bold and everyone else just trying to get by and figure it all out. Part sober autopsy of Winston-Salem’s past, part love letter to his hometown, part examination of Camel City’s underbelly, and a hopeful look forward at the possibilities. Shape I’m In pulls no punches and gives no quarter. From the halls of the North Carolina legislature in Raleigh where corporately funded politicians made history by trying to turn the clock back to the 1950s to haunting scene of a senseless murder.