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Honky
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Honky Hardcover - 2000

by Conley, Dalton

  • Used
  • very good
  • Hardcover
  • first

This intensely personal and engaging memoir is the coming-of-age story of a white boy growing up in predominantly African-American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. "Honky" poignantly illuminates the vulnerability of childhood complicated by the effect of race and class at the deepest human level.

Description

University of California Press, 2000-10-02. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. First Printing with full number line. Very good hardcover in very good dust jacket. Tight and clean. NOT ex-library. Exterior looks great, spine is uncreased. Shelfwear is very minor. An all-around excellent copy. Ships same or next business day from Dinkytown in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Used - Very Good
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Details

  • Title Honky
  • Author Conley, Dalton
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition [ Edition: first
  • Condition Used - Very Good
  • Pages 243
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of California Press, Berkeley
  • Date 2000-10-02
  • Features Dust Cover
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 261823
  • ISBN 9780520215863 / 0520215869
  • Weight 1.06 lbs (0.48 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.4 x 5.92 x 0.9 in (21.34 x 15.04 x 2.29 cm)
  • Reading level 1150
  • Themes
    • Demographic Orientation: Urban
    • Ethnic Orientation: African American
    • Ethnic Orientation: Hispanic
    • Geographic Orientation: New York
  • Library of Congress subjects African American children - New York (State), Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.) - Social
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 00023774
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

First line

As my mother tells it, the week before I kidnapped the black baby I broke free from her in the supermarket, ran to the back of the last aisle, and grabbed the manager's microphone.

From the jacket flap

Americans have a tough time admitting two things about themselves: Race matters. Class matters. Dalton Conley's journey back and forth across the dividing lines invisibly etched on the map of Manhattan does with good story-telling what good sociology can't. He closes the sale. Through the eyes of a growing child he shows the difficulty of navigating without a map, the hard-won mastery of the unwritten rules. Young Dalton is bewildered by what most of us peers can't even perceive, the easy acceptance of white privilege. But instead of making a whiny tirade out of it, he makes us smell the street. It's a much more effective choice, if you ask me.--Ray Suarez, author of The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, and senior correspondent, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

Honky is dope. For all you white kids that grew up in Hip-Hop dominated America, this book is for you. It's a hard honest look at why, no matter how poor and ghetto you are or want to be, as long as you're white, you've still got an advantage in this country. . .very brave.--Danny Hoch, producer and star of Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop

An eye-opening account of what it is like to grow up white in a black inner-city social environment. It is marvelously rich with insights--and a good read, too.--Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City.

I love Honky -- Dalton Conley is a very clever fellow to have strip-mined material so close to home and come up with pure gold. Told within the narrative framework of a white boy's friendships in the minority projects where his liberal, artistic parents raised their family in conditions that came to resemble a fortress, this ruefully comic memoir of growing up fast in the city easily outdistances a dozen sociological treatises on the deep social clashes and warring values of our time.--Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape

Categories

Media reviews

Citations

  • Booklist, 09/15/2000, Page 192
  • Booklist Ed Choice Adu Bk YA's, 01/01/2001, Page 859
  • Choice, 01/01/2001, Page 990
  • Kirkus Reviews, 07/15/2000, Page 1030
  • Library Journal, 12/01/2000, Page 154
  • Mosaic, 11/01/2001, Page 29
  • Publishers Weekly, 08/14/2000, Page 335
  • Univ PR Books for Public Libry, 01/01/2001, Page 14

About the author

Dalton Conley is Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a faculty affiliate of the New York Genome Center.