Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. [Hardcover]

A literary miracle of form and content. The book pleads with us to find the moral imagination to break the American pattern of racial abuse. Allens ambitious, breathtaking book challenges the moral composition of the world it inhabits by telling all who listen: I loved my cousin and he loved me, and I know hed be alive if you loved him, too.A compassionate retelling of an abjectly tragic story...Among the most valuable contributions Allen makes is forcing us to ask: To what end are we locking up our children? Are we not foreclosing their options before their lives have even begun?...Allens analysis of gang cultureor the parastate, as she calls it, with its own bylaws and tragic form of appealmay be where shes at her ferocious best. [Allens memoir,Shes rightfully angry at what happened to her cousin, but it doesnt hide her empathy for families who endure hardship to visit their imprisoned loved ones, and it doesnt lessen her humanity toward the people whose imprisonment doesnt make sense. That, mixed with an aching, soaring joy are what youll find in 'Cuz,' and its going to make you thinkhard. Can you afford to miss that? No, make no mistake.The shattering story of her young cousin&'Cuz' is a powerful family memoir and study of the criminal justice system.Allen, whose writing is creative and accessible, uses her finely tuned talent to fold Michaels fate into the gathering storms of the U.S. criminal-justice system and Los Angeles gang-related and racial turmoil. Both a searching, personal elegy and a sure-footed lamentation of the systems meant to protect us, this is a searing must-read.[Allen] puts a face to the numbing statistics of incarcerated young black boys and men. . . . At its heart, Allens book is both an outcry and entreaty as she grapples with a painful reality.A literary and political event like Toni MorrisonsWhat starts as a personal memoir, an effort to resurrect from oblivion a beloved cousin who died young, modulaló(