Overview

From one of our most astute cultural observers, a piercing memoir about a family's breakup and the need simultaneously to embrace and distance ourselves from the people and events that shape us.
North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s: A child surrounded mostly by grandparents, aunts, and uncles born in the previous century, Malcolm Jones finds himself underfoot in a disintegrating marriage. His father is charming but careless about steady work, often gone from home and often drunk. His mother, a schoolteacher and faded Southern belle, clings to the past while hungering for respectability and stability. Jones vividly describes their faltering marriage as it plays out against larger cracks in society: the convulsions of desegregation and a popular culture that threatens the church-centered life of his family. He also recalls idyllic times and the ordinary, easy moments of an otherwise fraught childhood: discovering an old Victrola, attending a marionette show--experiences that offer a portal to other worlds.
Richly evoking a time and place with rare depth of feeling and a penetrating, often bittersweet candor, Malcolm Jones gives us the fundamental stories of a life--where he comes from, who he was, who he has become.

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9780307377722

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Malcolm Jones, longtime book critic for Newsweek, tells of his childhood in North Carolina not only in great detail, but with poignancy and gentle humor. - USA Today <br> A diffuse, evocative portrait of a child navigating a judgmental family ruled by Southern-fried traditions. - Entertainment Weekly <br> Insightful, interesting and telling in its details...tells in clear, perceptive prose of the time and place in which he found himself. -- Journal Book <p> Told with affection...There is an abundance of comic relief in those finely drawn characters, and self-pity is mercifully absent. -The Post and Courier <br> A delightful, moving and often unsettling book...He makes you laugh, he makes you cry, he makes you see and feel. Buy and read Little Boy Blues. -The Washington Times<br> <br> Warmly elegant...Jones retrieves elusive memories--of his emotionally stranded mother; his alcoholic, mostly absent father; his devout, 'casually racist' aunt and uncle--and c

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