A startling series of testimonies about urban violence from New York City teens. These first-person essays on sociological issues first appeared in New Youth Connection, a newspaper for and by students of New York City high schools. By choosing the best essays on the theme of violence, the editors have compiled a book more eloquent than a thousand police reports. For the writers live in housing projects; they know violence all too well. So why do kids kill each other? In their own words, “Kids nowadays are ready to kill . . . over the dumbest things.” You’ll hear talk of trafficking in gold chains—one young man is stabbed for a good fake. Yet the cause of violence is rarely just material. Instead, it erupts when one gets —dissed— (disrespected) too often in a life where to hold onto a shred of dignity is rare. To their credit, two of the teenage boys here write about why they will not pack a pistol: because they’ve seen innocent loved ones get killed, and because it gives the owner a dangerously distorted sense of power. While all the killing seems to involve young men who treat life “like a reset button in a video game,” some of the most abused victims are the young women in their lives—or, in one case, a homosexual young man who cannot take part in their bad-mustached, bad-mouthed behavior. Among the women, one Chinese girl, not dressed provocatively enough to earn the usual stream of catcalls from the corner full of unemployed truants, is angry enough to say, after a bottle is thrown at her, that it’s as though a female in the city “has a bullseye on her body.” Unheard voices crying for a hearing.
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83754-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
A unique format for a memoir—Lowry (Stay!, 1997, etc.) offers up quotes from her books, dates, black-and-white photographs, and recollections of each shot, as well as the other memories surrounding it. The technique is charming and often absorbing; readers meet Lowry's grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren in a manner that suggests thumbing through a photo album with her. The tone is friendly, intimate, and melancholy, because living comes with sorrow: her sister died of cancer at age 28, and Lowry's son, a pilot, died when his plane crashed. Her overall message is taken from the last words that son, Grey, radioed: "You're on your own." The format of this volume is accessible and it reflects the way events are remembered—one idea leading to another, one memory jostling another; unlike conventional autobiographies, however, it will leave readers with unanswered questions: Who was her first husband—and father of her children? Why are her surviving children hardly mentioned? Why does it end—but for one entry—in 1995? It's still an original presentation, one to be appreciated on its own merits.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-89543-X
Page Count: 189
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
A book of hope for lives that need turning around.
The story of how discovering the secret of her birth transformed Stein’s life.
In the opening chapter, the author recalls how, as a 12-year-old girl of mixed, uncertain race adopted into an academic family and a life of the arts, she found a letter that devastated her. Her adoptive mother had long ago made a request that the author’s birth certificate be altered so that she would never learn that she had been born in prison to a heroin-addicted mother. It also seems that, as a baby, she had passed through a series of foster homes, none of which she remembers. “I tuck the paper back into the liner and float from the dresser into my parents’ bedroom and stare at myself in the mirror over the sink, my body in overload” writes Stein. “Time and space distort inside me, I don’t know where I am.” Perhaps the revelation comes too early in the narrative, before readers have gotten a chance to get to know the writer, but such overwriting (and overdramatizing) initially seems to undermine a story that is powerful enough on its own. Through the first half of the memoir, it remains difficult to get to know Stein due to the fact that she doesn’t really know herself. She plainly had some behavioral issues before the revelation—a deep resentment toward her adoptive parents, a penchant for acting out and a hyperactive mind that would likely be diagnosed as ADD—but she spiraled downward into addiction, crime, and unsatisfying sex with both men and women before she turned her life around. The redemptive second half of the memoir explains much of the first, as she learns what heroin in utero can cause, follows a paper trail back to her prison origin, comes to terms with both her birth mother and her adoptive family, and devotes her life to helping and raising consciousness about women in prison.
A book of hope for lives that need turning around.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-9810-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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