Fire Shut Up in My Bones
Mariner Books
ISBN13:
9780544570115
$15.61
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.
- | Author: Charles Blow
- | Publisher: Mariner Books
- | Publication Date: September 01, 2015
- | Number of Pages: 240 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Paperback
- | ISBN-10: 0544570111
- | ISBN-13: 9780544570115
- Author:
- Charles Blow
- Publisher:
- Mariner Books
- Publication Date:
- September 01, 2015
- Number of pages:
- 240 pages
- Language:
- English
- Binding:
- Paperback
- ISBN-10:
- 0544570111
- ISBN-13:
- 9780544570115