Synopsis
An African-American reporter reflects on his place in a predominantly white world and describes the transformation of the town in which he was raised from a thriving industrial city to a slum ridden with crime and drugs. 17,500 first printing. Tour.
Reviews
A provocative coming-of-age memoir that candidly addresses questions of loyalty to family, class, and race. Staples (editorial board/The New York Times) began this memoir of growing up in, and then leaving, a familiar black world shortly after Blake, the third of his four brothers and seventh of his nine siblings, was fatally wounded in a drug deal that went wrong. The author recalls as a child being ``morbidly vigilant about the past. Not the past of a year ago or even the previous day, but the past of the last few seconds,'' attributing this fixation to the way his family lived--``we moved all the time, when my parents were separated and again when they reconciled.'' This sense of impermanence left its mark in other ways. His father drank, his mother was loving but extravagant, and though Staples excelled at school, he lacked direction. But the time was the late Sixties, and even in the conservative Pennsylvania town he grew up in, educational opportunities were being extended to talented blacks and he was accepted as an ``at risk student'' at a local college. While he was at the University of Chicago and soon writing for local publications, his family deteriorated further: one sister was arrested, another was pregnant and unmarried, and his brothers were into drugs. Family holidays ``were as grim as they'd always been,'' and Staples rarely went home. His brother's death brought him back briefly, but in the family portrait taken then, he stands ``apart, studying my family from a distance. This is the way it has always been.'' Kept under tight control, Staples's anger and grief nevertheless infuse his story with a fierce anguish at the implacability of life and the passing of time. A notable debut. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
YA-The story of a man's journey from his childhood in a mixed-race factory town to a position on the editorial staff of The New York Times. The oldest of nine children born to a hard-drinking man and saintly woman, Staples describes how his early years were marked by frequent moves to avoid eviction, hijinks with neighborhood pals, and a keen sense of observation. In high school, although eligible for college prep courses, he elected the safer bet, commercial studies. A chance meeting with a professor at Penn Morton College, who arranged for his entry into an academic boot camp, expanded his opportunities. Employment in the predominantly white world of journalism followed his advanced degree. Students will empathize with the universal adolescent concerns and experiences, and witness Staples's anger at prejudice he encounters as well as his angst as he strives to understand the world and his place in it.
Barbara Hawkins, Oakton High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
In spare, affecting prose, Staples, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times , here recalls his hardscrabble boyhood in the mostly black world of Chester, Pa., and the pains and privileges of later joining a middle-class, whiter milieu. The oldest son among nine children, the author feared his violent alcoholic father but gained a nascent writer's sensibility from the kitchen rhythms of his mother and her friends. As if reflecting the dislocations of his 1960s youth, Staples sketches numerous fragments: his older sister slipping toward delinquency, the challenge by bullies at a new school, the untimely shooting death of his cousin. With wry hindsight he recalls his Black Power activism before he took advantage of a scholarship to a local college and won a graduate scholarship to the University of Chicago. The book ends with the first success of Staples's journalism career, which is paralleled with the death of his drug-dealing brother Blake in 1983. He observes resonantly that chance and complexity, not a simple morality tale, must be factored into any accounting for their divergent paths.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Staples forcefully relates a harrowing tale of growing up in a world of violence and uncertainty in the black neighborhoods of Chester, Pennsylvania. Because of his father's drinking problem, rent payments were always in arrears, so his large family was constantly moving from one apartment to another. Schooling was haphazard. Somehow, almost through a fluke, he went on to college, earned an advanced degree, and thus gained entry to a professional world dominated by white people. This book, reflecting his early experiences and his current ambivalence about his loyalties and sense of self, were triggered by the murder of his brother, who had become a drug dealer. Writing in the street language of his youth, he describes some of the strengths of black society before the infiltration of the drug culture. This powerful account is recommended for most collections.
- Carol R. Glatt, VA Medical Ctr. Lib., Philadelphia
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Staples was born poor and black, the first son in a troubled marriage that produced nine children. He has made his way to a graduate degree from the University of Chicago and membership on the editorial board of the New York Times. His journey would be intriguing however presented, but it becomes a swift read at the hands of a perceptive, articulate journalist-as-biographer. Focusing on early events and first forays into the white world, Staples describes the turmoil generated by stepping beyond his birth world. Jogging in Chicago's Hyde Park, he moves from being a neutral observer, to embarrassed sensitivity to the fear he arouses, to a harried defiance of that fear. He prepares for the death of a younger brother trafficking in drugs. With admirable economy, Staples brings home the incessant, sometimes torturous choices made to hold an uncertain, and uncertainly, chosen course. In narrowing his story, he reveals less than readers might want, but we may hear more later. Virginia Dwyer
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