Fire shut up in my bones : a memoir / Charles M. Blow.
Material type: TextPublisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014Description: 228 pages ; 24 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 0544228049 (hardcover)
- 9780544228047 (hardcover) :
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Materials specified | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book | Main Library | Biography | Blow, C. B657 | Available | 33111007624790 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
A gorgeous, moving memoir of how one of America's most innovative and respected journalists found his voice by coming to terms with a painful past
New York Times columnist Charles M. 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.
The house with no steps -- Thanksgiving -- Chester -- The punk next door -- Look-away Jesus -- Change -- Another boy's baby -- The brothers -- Hell week -- The champagne-colored girl -- Lie detector -- The just-in-case-gun.
"New York Times columnist Charles M. 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"--Amazon.com.