A deluxe Beacon Classics edition of the candid and riveting memoir from the founder of Harlem Children's Zone, taking readers through his childhood in which violence stalked every street corner.
Long before the avalanche of praise for his work—from Oprah Winfrey, President Barack Obama, and First Lady Michelle Obama—long before he became known for his talk show appearances, Members Project spots, and documentaries like Waiting for “Superman”, Geoffrey Canada was a small boy growing up scared on the mean streets of the South Bronx.
His childhood world was one where “sidewalk boys” learned the codes of the block and were ranked through the rituals of fist, stick, and knife. Then the streets changed, and the stakes got even higher. Now in a new hardcover edition, Fist Stick Knife Gun still proves to be an important memoir about growing up surrounded by violence and yet overcoming adversity.
"The Harlem Children's Zone (is) an all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck anti-poverty effort that is literally saving a generation of children in a neighborhood where they were never supposed to have a chance. . . . The first part of my plan to combat urban poverty will be to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone in twenty cities across the country." —President-elect Barack Obama, July 18, 2007
"A shattering depiction of the logic of our violent streets, from 'one of this country's genuine heroes.'" —Charles Johnson
"The vignettes band together with a kind of clarifying momentum, so that the result is something more. . . . A beacon." —New York Times Book Review
"A more powerful depiction of the tragic life of urban children and a more compelling plea to end 'America's war against itself' cannot be imagined." —Publishers Weekly
"Geoff Canada has been cultivating virtue, and hope, in children for the past 10 years." —Newsweek
"A slim, revealing volume that should be required reading for anyone who was ever a child, for anyone who has ever negotiated the complicated hierarchy of 'rep' and revenge on city streets." —Boston Globe
"Part memoir, part social treatise, a wholly sobering view of inner-city violence and the codes surrounding it." —Kirkus Reviews
"A searing memoir . . . Canada's blunt observations are as refreshing as they are bold."—Paula Woods, San Francisco Chronicle
"Should be required reading . . . Here is the role model, the griot, the nurturer, the brother who never left the 'hood because he keeps looking into the faces of the children and seeing himself there."—Patricia Smith, Boston Globe
"Geoffrey Canada has never lost touch with the child within himself or with the fears of the children around him struggling to reach adulthood in the violent streets of America."—Marian Wright Edelman, author of The Measure of Our Success
"An urban coming-of-age story, it contrasts the mean streets of the author's South Bronx youth in the 1960s to the drug-and-gun culture afflicting today's urban youth."—Jim Bencivenga, Christian Science Monitor
