Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir
By:
- Synopsis
-
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.
- Copyright:
- 2014
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9780544302587
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780544570115
- Publisher:
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Date of Addition:
- 04/19/17
- Copyrighted By:
- Charles M. Blow
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Parenting and Family, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender, Education
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.