Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
Mabry, a 27-year-old foreign correspondent for Newsweek, joins the stream of black male memoirists with this diffuse, partly affecting tale of his path from the ghetto to a sometimes precarious place in the white mainstream. It is by now a familiar story, so the challenge is in the telling. Mabry writes fluidly enough about his isolated youth near Trenton, N.J.: ``My grandmother and my encyclopedias were my best friends.'' He cites the help of his self-sacrificing yet self-defeating mother, as well as government aid, as the source of his success. Most of this book, however, concerns Mabry's rewarding but rocky times as a scholarship prep-school student at Lawrenceville (N.J.) and as an undergraduate at Stanford, plus his entre into France and a budding career at Newsweek. Some of his anecdotes are illuminating; for example, his tale of rejection by Stanford blacks and his criticism of ``the galloping paranoia'' against political correctness. However, as he closes his memoir with a scene of reconciliation with his long-estranged father and his struggling brother, it seems Mabry might have waited a bit longer to sort it all into perspective. (Aug.)
Mary Carroll
By the time Mabry, a "Newsweek" Paris correspondent, was born in 1967, Martin Luther King had less than a year to live and the civil rights movement was splintering. The heroes of Mabry's story are the stubborn women who raised him: his pragmatic grandmother Merle Thomas, who moved her family from rural Georgia to West Palm Beach, Florida, to a working-class suburb of Trenton, New Jersey; and his mother Jerrilynn, unable to realize her own educational and show-biz dreams but committed to keeping her son's options unlimited. Both women worked when they could, but Uncle Sam sometimes kept their family fed. Money from Jerrilynn's drug-dealer boyfriend paid for cherished Christmas presents. When Mabry qualified for Lawrenceville (a ritzy, mostly WASP boarding school), exchange student status in France (Stanford University and the Sorbonne), and job offers from "Newsweek" and other leading mainstream publications, he learned firsthand what W. E. B. Du Bois meant by "double consciousness." Is Mabry too young to write a memoir? Sure. Does he have important things to tell readers, whatever our age and race? Definitely. A penetrating, gracefully written dissection of life on the racial and generational cusp.
