an amazing book i need to recommend - Ace of Spades by David Matthews
this is my first posting. hello! my name is sarah, and i'm half black half jewish. my mother is jewish.
A friend of mine recommended a book called 'Ace of Spades' by David Matthews (you can find it here: http://tr.im/iGsu), and I love it so much. I'm half way through it and I can't believe how great this book is. It's so funny and personable. There are moments where I have to put the book down and just burst out laughing. But wow, is it well written! David Matthews is poetic with his words. Truly astounding.
Here's a brief description from The New Yorker:
The son of a Zionist white mother and a Malcolm X-admiring black father, Matthews, in this memoir, is a boy without a race in a city, Baltimore, that requires him to choose one. The story of racial pinball is not entirely unfamiliar: the black kids reject him as too light-skinned, the whites as too broad-nosed. But Matthews displays improvisational verve-blacks are "burnished" and "browned butter," and whites are anything from "alabaster" to "a puffy marshmallow in Baltimore’s steaming cup of cocoa"-and narrates with the vigor of a movie script. Indeed, it is on television that, as a child, he finds the clarity he yearns for. "I was a living contradiction of elements that shouldn’t have been," he writes at one point, whereas on TV "everything was black, or white, and a lot like life."
Really, i can't recommend this book more! I love it! Have you read it?
here's the author, david matthews:
A friend of mine recommended a book called 'Ace of Spades' by David Matthews (you can find it here: http://tr.im/iGsu), and I love it so much. I'm half way through it and I can't believe how great this book is. It's so funny and personable. There are moments where I have to put the book down and just burst out laughing. But wow, is it well written! David Matthews is poetic with his words. Truly astounding.
Here's a brief description from The New Yorker:
The son of a Zionist white mother and a Malcolm X-admiring black father, Matthews, in this memoir, is a boy without a race in a city, Baltimore, that requires him to choose one. The story of racial pinball is not entirely unfamiliar: the black kids reject him as too light-skinned, the whites as too broad-nosed. But Matthews displays improvisational verve-blacks are "burnished" and "browned butter," and whites are anything from "alabaster" to "a puffy marshmallow in Baltimore’s steaming cup of cocoa"-and narrates with the vigor of a movie script. Indeed, it is on television that, as a child, he finds the clarity he yearns for. "I was a living contradiction of elements that shouldn’t have been," he writes at one point, whereas on TV "everything was black, or white, and a lot like life."
Really, i can't recommend this book more! I love it! Have you read it?
here's the author, david matthews: