"I predict this will become a classic of American memoir. I was caught off guard by Charles Blow’s book. Having known and admired him from his exceptional NYT op ed pieces, mostly on politics or race, I didn’t expect this overwhelmingly powerful story of an African American boy growing up in rural Louisiana, poor, sexually abused, always feeling an outsider. Its gripping particularity holds you until you finally put it down, exhausted and exhilarated, only to be overcome by the wider truths he has revealed—about community, family, love, sexuality, poverty, and the social and racial realities of late 20th century America. This book will stay with you for a very long time."
Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication Date 2014-09-23
Section New Hardcover - Biography / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780544228047
Blow mines the compelling poetry of the out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where he grew up—a place where slavery's legacy felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders' stories and in the near-constant wash of violence.
Blow's attachment to his mother—a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, a job plucking poultry at a nearby factory, a soon-to-be-ex husband, and a love of newspapers and learning—cannot protect him from secret abuse at the hands of an older cousin. It's damage that triggers years of anger and searing self-questioning.
Finally, Blow escapes to a nearby state university, where he joins a black fraternity after a passage of brutal hazing, and then enters a world of racial and sexual privilege that feels like everything he's ever needed and wanted, until he's called upon, himself, to become the one perpetuating the shocking abuse.
A powerfully redemptive memoir that both fits the tradition of African-American storytelling from the South, and gives it an indelible new slant.
