Fire Shut Up in My BonesFire Shut Up in My Bones
a Memoir
Title rated 4.25 out of 5 stars, based on 73 ratings(73 ratings)
Book, 2014
Current format, Book, 2014, , All copies in use.eBook
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New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow mines the compelling poetry of the out-of-time Black 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 Black American storytelling from the South, and gives it an indelible new slant. Charles M. Blow is a New York Times columnist and CNN commentator. He lives in Brooklyn.
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- Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.
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