This intensely personal and engaging memoir is the coming-of-age story of a white boy growing up in a neighborhood of predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. Vividly evoking the details of city life from a child's point of view - the streets, buses, and playgrounds - "Honky" poignantly illuminates the usual vulnerabilities of childhood complicated by unusual circumstances. As he narrates these sharply etched and often funny memories, Conley shows how race and class shaped ...
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This intensely personal and engaging memoir is the coming-of-age story of a white boy growing up in a neighborhood of predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. Vividly evoking the details of city life from a child's point of view - the streets, buses, and playgrounds - "Honky" poignantly illuminates the usual vulnerabilities of childhood complicated by unusual circumstances. As he narrates these sharply etched and often funny memories, Conley shows how race and class shaped his life and the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors. A brilliant case study for illuminating the larger issues of inequality in American society, Honky brings us to a deeper understanding of the privilege of whiteness, the social construction of race, the power of education, and the challenges of inner-city life. Conley's father, a struggling artist, and his mother, an aspiring writer, joined Manhattan's bohemian subculture in the late 1960s, living on food stamps and raising their family in a housing project. We come to know his mother: her quirky tastes, her robust style, and the bargains she strikes with Dalton - not to ride on the backs of buses, and to always carry money in his shoe as protection against muggers. We also get to know his father, his face buried in racing forms, and his sister, who in grade school has a burning desire for cornrows. From the hilarious story of three-year-old Dalton kidnapping a black infant so he could have a baby sister to the deeply disturbing shooting of a close childhood friend, this memoir touches us with movingly rendered portraits of people and the unfolding of their lives. Conley's story provides a sophisticated example of the crucial role culture plays in defining race and class. Both of Conley's parents retained the 'cultural capital' of the white middle class, and they passed this on to their son in the form of tastes, educational expectations, and a general sense of privilege. It is these advantages that ultimately provide Conley with his ticket to higher education and beyond. A tremendously good read, Honky addresses issues both timely and timeless that pertain to us all.
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Very Good in Very Good jacket. First Printing with full number line. Very good hardcover in very good dust jacket. Tight and clean. NOT ex-library. Exterior looks great, spine is uncreased. Shelfwear is very minor. An all-around excellent copy. Ships same or next business day from Dinkytown in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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Very good. A copy that has been read, but remains in excellent condition. Pages are intact and are not marred by notes or highlighting, but may contain a neat previous owner name. The spine remains undamaged. An ex-library book and may have standard library stamps and/or stickers. At ThriftBooks, our motto is: Read More, Spend Less.
Having grown up in a NYC housing project and engaged in writing my own book on the topic, I was interested in reading about Conley's everyday life in Alphabet City. Conley's book reminded me a little of Norman Podhoretz's essay My Negro Problem -- And Ours. I'm not an adherent of Podhoretz's politics but I thought Podhoretz's piece was very good because of its personal honesty (my Jewish working class family was, like Podhoretz's, from Brownsville, Brooklyn). I had one small problem with Conley's book. It was in his interjection of academic sociology into the text, detracting from the text's personal nature. Yes, he is a sociologist. But he is also a memoirist, and his memory should do the speaking. For example, in an episode in chapter 9, a minority kid almost stabs Conley and steals Conley's precious baseball glove. At the end of the chapter the author more or less excuses the bully with a short exegesis on the privilege of the middle and upper classes. It is as if he put these interjections into the book for fear of being seen as prejudiced. If he would have left them out, the book would have been better (and only a careless reader would have thought him prejudiced). The sociology detracts from the here-and-now that Dalton the child is feeling. Podhoretz doesn't do that, and pours out the his and his family members' awful feelings. That kind of terrible honesty makes for good writing.
