Fire Shut Up In My Bones
by Charles M. Blow
- 2 Time Power List Bestselling Book
- Hurston/Wright Honored Book (2015)
- A New York Times Notable Book for 2014
Publication Date: Sep 23, 2014
List Price: $27.00
Format: Hardcover, 240 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780544228047
Imprint: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Parent Company: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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.
Books similiar to Fire Shut Up In My Bones may be found in the categories below:
- Biography & Autobiography / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / General
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- Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
- Family & Relationships / Abuse / Child Abuse
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