Down These Mean Streets

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Description

Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age at the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here used to be the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking The united states; a dark-skinned morenito in a circle of relatives that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here used to be an unsparing document of Thomas’s plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery–a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri used to be sent to prison for shooting a cop.

As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that may be as exultant as it’s harrowing and whose each and every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its writer’s voice. Thirty years after its first appearance, this classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendence is to be had in an anniversary edition with a new Introduction by the writer.
The 30th anniversary edition of this classic memoir about growing up in Spanish Harlem includes an afterword reminding us that its streets are even meaner now, thanks to crack cocaine and the dismantling of government poverty programs. As a dark-skinned Puerto Rican, born in 1928, Piri Thomas faced with painful immediacy the absurd contradictions of The united states’s racial attitudes (among people of all colors) in a time of wrenching social change. Three decades have not dimmed the luster of his jazzy prose, wealthy in Hispanic rhythms and beat-generation slang.

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