How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning The Racist Lessons Of A Southern Childhood - Brossura

Grimsley, Jim

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1616205342 ISBN 13: 9781616205348

Casa editrice: Algonquin Books, 2016

Riassunto

“A powerful meditation on race.” —Natasha Trethewey, U.S. Poet Laureate
 
Acclaimed novelist Jim Grimsley was eleven years old in 1966 when the school in his small eastern North Carolina town was first integrated, the year federally mandated integration of the schools went into effect in the state.  

His family shared the community’s dismay over the mixing of the races, yet young Jim found himself on the front lines of his school’s desegregation. What he did not realize until he began to meet these new students was just how deeply ingrained his own prejudices were, and how those prejudices had developed in him despite the fact that prior to starting sixth grade, he had actually never known any black people. 

Now, almost fifty years later, Grimsley looks back at that school and those turbulent times--as alliances were formed and friendships established--and asks, how far we have really come?
 
“A beautifully written coming-of-age recollection from the era of racial desegregation.” —Booklist, starred review
 
“The boy in this narrative is becoming a man in a time of enormous change, and his point of view is like a razor cutting through a callous. Painful and healing. Forthright and enormously engaging.” —Dorothy Allison, author ofBastard Out of Carolina
 
“How I Shed My Skin is, simply put, a brilliant book . . . straightforward and plain-spoken while at the same time achingly moving and intimately honest, and it does more to explain the South than anything I’ve read in a long, long time.”—Josephine Humphreys, author of No Where Else on Earth

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Jim Grimsley is the author of four previous novels, among them Winter Birds, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; Dream Boy, winner of the GLBTF Book Award for literature; My Drowning, a Lila-Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award winner; and Comfort and Joy. He lives in Atlanta and teaches at Emory University.

Dalla quarta di copertina:

. . . Good people taught and still teach racism to their children without a second thought. This was true in the South of my birth and remains so to the present . . . We teach that God created the races to be separate from one another for a purpose, and we preach that this purpose cannot be to mix, because why then would He have created the separation in the first place? We teach that when people are different from each other, one is better and the other worse . . . We teach that black and white are not simply different but opposite. —from How I Shed My Skin

“Race has been at the forefront of the national conversation . . . The country is discussing how far we still have to go.How I Shed My Skin, by Jim Grimsley, is a white writer’s story of that journey—where we’ve come from and how we move forward.”—The Washington Post

“Grimsley says, ‘I was a good little racist’ . . . It’s the defining moment in Grimsley’s new memoir about desegregation, a day when he sensed that everything he’d been taught about black people was wrong.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Powerful . . . Grimsley’s brave self-examination of his own childhood prejudices makes this book personal; his struggle to reconcile and overcome those prejudices makes it universal.”—Birmingham magazine

“Grimsley impersonates his younger self with great skill and delicacy . . . He doesn’t pretend that simply sitting next to black classmates suddenly changed his way of looking at the world . . . The process occurred over many years and much searching.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Eloquent, moving . . . A welcome addition to our constant, ever-evolving conversation on race.” —Atlantamagazine

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Algonquin Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1616205342
• ISBN 13: 9781616205348
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 304