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Down These Mean Streets: A Memoir
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Down These Mean Streets: A Memoir Paperback - 1997

by Thomas, Piri

  • Used
  • Good

Still relevant today, Piri Thomas's classic memoir of the "barrio" of Spanish Harlem celebrates its 30th anniversary of publication with a new Introduction by the author. As Thomas recounts his transformation from gang member, junkie, and stick-up man to poet of the streets, his memoir breathes new meaning into our notions of manhood, survival, and redemption.

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Details

  • Title Down These Mean Streets: A Memoir
  • Author Thomas, Piri
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition Reprint
  • Condition Used - Good
  • Pages 352
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Vintage, New York
  • Date 1997-11-25
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 0679781420-11-1
  • ISBN 9780679781424 / 0679781420
  • Weight 0.58 lbs (0.26 kg)
  • Dimensions 7.96 x 5.32 x 0.77 in (20.22 x 13.51 x 1.96 cm)
  • Reading level 820
  • Themes
    • Catalog Heading: Language Arts/Literature
    • Curriculum Strand: Language Arts/Literature
  • Library of Congress subjects New York (N.Y.), Harlem (New York, N.Y.)
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 98114757
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

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From the jacket flap

Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery--a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop.
As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author's voice. Thirty years after its first appearance, this classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendence is available in an anniversary edition with a new Introduction by the author.

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Media reviews

"Piri Thomas describes the passionate, painful search to validate his manhood...He has done it all in Harlem's mean streets and gone on from machismo to manhood, acquiring during the journey an understanding of man."--The Nation

Citations

  • School Library Journal, 02/01/2017, Page 50

About the author

PIRI THOMAS was born of Puerto Rican and Cuban parents in New York City's Spanish Harlem in 1928. Poverty in the ghetto led him to drugs, youth gangs, and a series of criminal activities, for which he served seven years in prison. There he began his life of rehabilitation, vowing to use his street and prison experience to turn youths away from lives of crime. Mr. Thomas then lectured at schools and universities across the country, and authored several books including Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand; Seven Long Times; and Stories from El Barrio. He died in 2011, at the age of 83.