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Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White, by Brent Staples
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In this evocative memoir, Brent Staples poses some compelling questions: Where does the family end the self begin? What do we owe our families and what do we owe ourselves? What part of the past is a gift and what part a shackle?
As the oldest son among nine children, Brent grew up in a small industrial town near Philadelphia. Scholarship opportunities pulled him out of the black world where he had grown up into a world largely defined by whites. Meanwhile, as the industries that supported his hometown failed, and drug dealing rushed in to fill the economic void, news of arrests and premature deaths among Brent's childhood friends underscored his precarious perch in a mostly white environment. The death of his younger brother -- a cocaine dealer murdered by one of his "clients" -- propelled Brent into a reconsideration of his childhood that offers vivid portraits of family values that supported, pressures that tore apart, and the appeal and pain of living as an adult in a world that was literally and figuratively miles away from the one he knew as a child.
- Sales Rank: #1115943 in Books
- Published on: 2000-05-03
- Released on: 2000-05-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .65" w x 5.31" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In spare, affecting prose, Staples, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times , here recalls his hardscrabble boyhood in the mostly black world of Chester, Pa., and the pains and privileges of later joining a middle-class, whiter milieu. The oldest son among nine children, the author feared his violent alcoholic father but gained a nascent writer's sensibility from the kitchen rhythms of his mother and her friends. As if reflecting the dislocations of his 1960s youth, Staples sketches numerous fragments: his older sister slipping toward delinquency, the challenge by bullies at a new school, the untimely shooting death of his cousin. With wry hindsight he recalls his Black Power activism before he took advantage of a scholarship to a local college and won a graduate scholarship to the University of Chicago. The book ends with the first success of Staples's journalism career, which is paralleled with the death of his drug-dealing brother Blake in 1983. He observes resonantly that chance and complexity, not a simple morality tale, must be factored into any accounting for their divergent paths.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA-The story of a man's journey from his childhood in a mixed-race factory town to a position on the editorial staff of The New York Times. The oldest of nine children born to a hard-drinking man and saintly woman, Staples describes how his early years were marked by frequent moves to avoid eviction, hijinks with neighborhood pals, and a keen sense of observation. In high school, although eligible for college prep courses, he elected the safer bet, commercial studies. A chance meeting with a professor at Penn Morton College, who arranged for his entry into an academic boot camp, expanded his opportunities. Employment in the predominantly white world of journalism followed his advanced degree. Students will empathize with the universal adolescent concerns and experiences, and witness Staples's anger at prejudice he encounters as well as his angst as he strives to understand the world and his place in it.
Barbara Hawkins, Oakton High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Staples forcefully relates a harrowing tale of growing up in a world of violence and uncertainty in the black neighborhoods of Chester, Pennsylvania. Because of his father's drinking problem, rent payments were always in arrears, so his large family was constantly moving from one apartment to another. Schooling was haphazard. Somehow, almost through a fluke, he went on to college, earned an advanced degree, and thus gained entry to a professional world dominated by white people. This book, reflecting his early experiences and his current ambivalence about his loyalties and sense of self, were triggered by the murder of his brother, who had become a drug dealer. Writing in the street language of his youth, he describes some of the strengths of black society before the infiltration of the drug culture. This powerful account is recommended for most collections.
- Carol R. Glatt, VA Medical Ctr. Lib., Philadelphia
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Coming of Age in a Pennsylvania Ghetto
By Herbert L Calhoun
Brent Staples is a fabulous writer and that about says it all. He captures Elijah Anderson's "Codes of the Street" in about as few and as colorful words as it can be done. His metaphors cover a lot of ground, leaving the reader asking for more.
Born and raised in a small industrial town near Philadelphia, into a large dirt poor family, Staples learned the hard way that his life was never entirely his own; that is to say, it never was entirely within the grasp of his own hands. "Agency" was the main missing element. Time, all at once was his enemy, his muse and his ally. For no one knows what will happen around the next bend, or the next month, or how the events of yesterday will shape life today or the future? In the ghetto. capriciousness is the "watch word:" It is "the way of the world" in America's black ghetto. There just are too many uncertainties, imponderables, too many random contingenciesand random variables, to plan. Planning is a luxury reserved for the "haves" not for the "have nots." Time, as a manipulatible variable, remains "off the table" for ghetto residents.
One has to learn how to "bob and "weave" even when one does not quite understand what it means to "bob" and "weave." That is the nature of the animal. Life moves on, and always according to a someone else's time plan, always at a different rhythm in the ghetto. You either get aboard the train or you get left at the station. There are no other options. There are no second chances, no mulligans, no appeals to higher authorities, no reruns or "do overs; its improvised life on the edge and in the raw at all times. Not to be "on yours toes" at all times is an occupational hazard in the ghetto that can get you killed.
This book is a disjointed chronicle of a "coming of age" in a disjointed time, and within a disjointed family, situated in a disjointed world. In fact everything about this story is disjointed but the author's prose: which is smooth and world class. Yet, in so many ways, it is a universal story about American humanity, or lack thereof.
It is the author's humanity and that of the community in which he grew up in that we get a glimpse of. It is a subjectivity mainstream American is constantly shielded from. But that is all there is to this story: the subjectivity of the canonical black experience. It is a narrative populated with the same characters one would find in any large dysfunctional family and ghetto community. Yet, here that subjectivity takes on cosmic existential meanings; it becomes the prototype for a world gone awry, and no one knows just why, or seem to care that it has done so? The American black ghetto experience is one of many cultural black holes (both figuratively and literally) punched through the fabric of American Racial Dictatorship.
The difference, however between the normal mainstream dysfunctional family and a ghetto dysfunctional family is that everything "turns on a dime" in the ghetto. A wrong glance can get you killed. Cut your foot on a piece of glass, and because there is no money for proper medical care, it can also get you just as dead. If a white teacher likes you, you can get "tracked" in the fast lane with all of the white kids, and end up taking Latin and Algebra then you might end up being a journalist, a Phd, and can live a reasonably comfortable life, as the author did. Or, if she does not like you are happens to be a passive-aggressive racists like many of them are, then you can get "tracked" with the rest of the dummies (as most of his other eight sisters and brothers did) and never get an education at all -- as happened to his brother Blake who lived out the prototypical life of a "tracked student" turned drug dealer with the expected consequences, being laid out on a slab in the morgue.
Fate, in ghetto life, from top to bottom, always is governed by a single roll of the dice. It gives a whole new meaning to the word existential. Everything in the ghetto is existential. If you don't grab your own bootstraps, someone will steal your boots, or your lights will be cut off, or your clothes and furniture will be tossed into the streets, or you sister will be raped, or your father will beat the crap out of your mom, or the cops will mistakenly break your door down and refuse to even say I am sorry; or your house will be robbed, or the police with arrest and convict you on a trumped charge, or --- ad infinitum. And this capriciousness is the only normality, the only certainty, the only reality.
Dignity in the ghetto is always just a matter of perspective. Life gets telescoped down to only the bare essentials. No room for whiners or sissies. The essence of the human being lays raw, out in the open, and time does not wait for anyone to get his act together. Life moves on with an urgency with or without you. And in the ghetto, it almost always moves on without you. Five Stars
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Sin City on the Delaware
By Joseph T. Prock
I read Parallel Time because of the Chester, PA background. I was interested in the black-point-of-view. Having come from Chester roughly around the same time, I was curious about Brent's experiences.
He lived there during the latter years of decline -- `60s and `70s. Founded by William Penn, Chester's reign of white lasted for centuries. With Ukrainians, Italians, Polish, Germans, Irish, and Jews driving the machine, Chester flourished against a backdrop of manufacturing and heavy industry. After the Second World War; What Chester Makes Makes Chester gave way to social emigration, crooked politics, and economic shifts to a city predominantly populated by blacks, gangs, and drugs.
Brent's life is the flip side of what many white Chesterites refer to as their "golden memories" like: Christmas time at Stotters, parades down Edgemont Avenue, hot dogs from John's Doggie Shop, hoagies from La Spada's, the Great Leopard Skating Rink, lunch at Whelan's, Brandywine Ice Cream, Rez, Chester High, St. James dances, Riverview Beach...
Brent's memories consist of friend's who've died of drugs, beatings, poverty, a dysfunctional family, constant fear, fair weather friends, a city morphing into a toxic wasteland, and the faint promise of a future through a collegiate educational system slowly enrolling blacks into their hallowed white halls.
The most interesting parts of his book were indeed Chester -- observations, memories, and characters. I also enjoyed his college experiences in Widener College and Swarthmore College during the latter part of the `60s -- the turbulent uprisings.
When Brent left for Chicago to pursue his PHD the story seemed to drag. I found myself getting a bit board. His encounter with the pursuit of Saul Bellow was anti-climatic. I noticed anytime he went back to Chester his story seemed to have more timbre and depth.
If you're interested about the black experience in Chester, PA during the waning years of a city enmeshed in history, ethnicity, sociological and economic transition, Brent Staple's has captured the spirit and flavor of the time. There is a lot of relevance here. His story reminds us there are two sides to a coin.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
An amazing book
By A Customer
Brent Staples is so subtle at revealing himself that you hardly notice you are thinking his thoughts until something bad happens in the book and you have to put the it down and recover from the shock. He is that good.
I read this book a while ago, but I am still concerned about his little sister who was burned in a fire, I still wonder where the hairdresser ran off to, and I still see the big red tail-lights of the old American cars blasting down the highway like rockets.
The only bad thing about this book is that it ended.
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