In a memoir that juxtaposes New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow's usual elegant and eloquent prose with the brutal truths of his early years, issues of race, poverty, sexuality and belonging are given a human face: his own.
Blow opens--as a college student--with the night he decided to kill his older cousin Chester for abusing him as a young boy. This agonized young man hovers at the edge of the reader's consciousness as Blow backs up to his first memory and walks us along the path that led to that desperate night.
Blow uses the details of his life to give shape and reality to what many of us understand only in the abstract. If the adage that you can know another person only by walking a mile in their shoes is true, then Blow doesn't just hand over his shoes, he ties the laces and nudges us in the right direction. He recounts his memories with grace and clarity, even laughter, speaking to the human heart in each of us. No reader will come away unaffected by this stellar memoir--a drop of hope in an ocean of sorrows. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads