FROM OUR EDITORS

When he was only three, Dalton Conley did his part for racial integration: He kidnapped the infant daughter of a black separatist down the street. Growing up in Manhattan's Lower East Side and Greenwich Village, Conley realized more than once that the thick ethnic stew of his neighborhood had left him a conspicuous outsider. His unsentimental memoir tells us much about race and class in America, and also much about growing up.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This intensely personal and engaging memoir is the coming-of-age story of a white boy growing up in a neighborhood of predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. Vividly evoking the details of city life from a child's point of view--the streets, buses, and playgrounds--Honky poignantly illuminates the usual vulnerabilities of childhood complicated by unusual circumstances. As he narrates these sharply etched and often funny memories, Conley shows how race and class shaped his life and the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors. A brilliant case study for illuminating the larger issues of inequality in American society, Honky brings us to a deeper understanding of the privilege of whiteness, the social construction of race, the power of education, and the challenges of inner-city life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Guardian UK

Conley has become a superstar by making connections between the field and the personal, or as the mission for his Centre for Advanced Social Science reads linking academy to policy to community. And now, in HONKY, he has mined his own life as a social science experiment.

Jerusalem Post

A quick and easy read, even for those unfamiliar with the setting, the writing is beautiful and the subject matter forever haunting.

New York Magazine

Honky vividly and subtly evokes the evokes the jarring distinctions of daily life in Manhattan circa 1980.

San Francisco Chronicle

By the end of this small but absorbing volume, readers will have experienced a rare opportunity for insight into the complexities of race in America. Honky provides a riveting passage through one man's coming of age in an America fractured by color and class but still longing for wholeness.

Publishers Weekly

"I've studied whiteness the way I would a foreign language," declares Conley at the outset of his affecting, challenging memoir, laced with the retrospective wisdom of the sociologist (at New York University) he has become. As the child of bohemian, white parents, he grew up in an otherwise black and Hispanic housing project on New York's Lower East Side. At elementary school in the 1970s, he found himself placed in the "Chinese class," after his stint in the black class--where he was the only student not to receive corporal punishment--left him uncomfortable. Despite the family's lack of funds, they had cultural capital in the form of social connections, and were able to transfer young Dalton to a better school, where he began to feel some snobbery toward kids in his own neighborhood. Yet the friend who accepted Dalton most was a black youth from the neighborhood, Jerome, who was tragically disabled in a random act of violence that helped spur Conley's parents to leave the Lower East Side for subsidized housing for artists. Part of the memoir concerns the universality of poverty--but a thoughtful examination of the privileges of race and class also emerges. Despite the book's title, the author cites only one major episode in which he was threatened and called "honky." Conley acknowledges that he doesn't know how to account for such successes as gaining admission into the selective Bronx High School of Science: race? parental protectiveness? his own aspirations? It is "the privilege of the middle and upper classes," he observes, to construct narratives of their own success "rather than having the media and society do it for us." (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.| Read all 7 "From The Critics" >