Despite the subtitle, those looking for an uplifting tale of redemption will not find much succor in this honest account,...
Brief, harrowing chronicle of the author’s time soldiering for the Bloods.
The book opens with a frenetic, imploring introduction by T. Rodgers, a West Coast O.G. so old-school he doesn’t even signify Blood or Crip, aligning instead with their precursors. Immediately following, Morris’s unusually affecting stream-of-consciousness prologue tosses readers right into the blood-spattered nightmare that was his traumatized life. Sent by his mother from New Jersey to Phoenix to live with strict Muslim relatives at a young age, Morris fell in with the gangbangers who thrived in his new neighborhood: “Out here on my own, I’m not safe. I don’t have much choice; I’m surrounded by gangs and all my friends are down with them.” The Bloods Morris ran with clearly relished the chance to play with their newest member, initiating him by driving to a Crip-run block and having him open fire on some rivals, then celebrating with weed and beer. He was ten years old. A move back to his mother’s house on the East Coast didn’t help much. By the time he was in high school Morris was a bona fide street soldier, warring not just with Crips but any clique or gang suspected of being a rival to his crew. He developed a schizoid split as he began to excel at football, eventually becoming team captain at the same time that he was running the streets. By the time a college scholarship and the possibility of an NFL future came his way, however, it seemed there was little that could disrupt the violent nightmare he was trapped in. Morris wasn’t remorseful when he finally went to jail (a surprisingly lenient six-month term), but that was where he decided to “choose a better LIFE.”
Despite the subtitle, those looking for an uplifting tale of redemption will not find much succor in this honest account, which doesn’t romanticize either gang life or its law-abiding alternative.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4846-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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