Little Boy Blues
A Memoir
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
For Malcolm Jones, his parents’ disintegrating marriage was at the center of life in North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s. His father, charming but careless, was often drunk and away from home; his mother, a schoolteacher and faded Southern belle, clung to the past and hungered for respectability. In Little Boy Lost, Jones—one of our most admired cultural observers—recalls a childhood in which this relationship played out against the larger cracks of society: the convulsions of desegregation and a popular culture that threatens the church-centered life of his family. He richly evokes a time and place with rare depth and candor, giving us the fundamental stories of a life—where he comes from, who he was, who he has become.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jones, a veteran cultural reporter for Newsweek, writes with muted confidence about his difficult childhood, during which the emotional ups and downs of his mostly-single mom seemed monumental, and his undependable, alcoholic father kept him in a state of disorientation. This at-times touching self-portrait depicts a quiet, quirky, self-contained little boy suffering quietly while surrounded by indulging elderly relatives, as well as a mother who hides her disappointment with a middle-class sense of superiority. Unfortunately, little happens in this memoir beyond a taboo-broaching divorce, and Jones fails to make anything significant out of everyday moments of love and tension; curiously, the prospect of engaging the big cultural issues, when it arises, is often set aside. (Though Jones grew up in the South during the turbulent 1950s, he tidily encapsulates "race and bigotry": "they were everywhere and nowhere, like an odorless, tasteless gas"; similarly, religion to him was "as water is to a fish.") Though admirably straightforward, Jones's portrayal is so flat as to give readers little to hold onto. 22 b&w photos.
