Minnesota’s brutally cold winter nights were just as dangerous in 1928, when sixteen-year-old Gordon Parks was thrown out of the house by his brother-in-law. Parks, who would find fame as a photographer, was the first African American to work at Life magazine and the first to write, direct, and score a Hollywood film. What does a boy do when it’s ten below and he has no place to go? He sleeps in a streetcar and fights desperation.

Parks’s amazing story of survival, hard work, and success is told in A Choice of Weapons, now back in print with MHS Press and featuring a new introduction by photographer Wing Young Huie.