GROWING UP FREE IN AMERICA - a book review

pstrongReViewSfortheRevOlutioN- a PNN review column for all your literary, visual and audio art needs/strong/p pDIV align="left" TABLE cellpadding="5"TR VALIGN="TOP"TDIMG SRC= "../sites/default/files/arch_img/350/photo_1_supplement.jpg" //td/trTR VALIGN="TOP"TD/td/trTR VALIGN="TOP"TDTR VALIGN="TOP"TD pby George Tirado/p pWhat can you say about a piece of work so volatile, that just reading the back cover of the book will make 80% of P.C. America cringe in their boots? "I own nigger . I purchased it with the blood of my fathers. I stole it from the mouths of my masters. I created it in the soul of my sons. It is mine. I am it's god......." This is only a taste of what there is to expect from bGrowing up Free in America/b by Bruce Jackson. /p pWhat Bruce Jackson has done is to take the pretty out of art, poetry and short prose, and instead of creating something nice for the reader, he has given us a loaded gun filled with bullets of reality./p pWhat makes Bruce Jackson's work important, especially now, is this war on poverty. This is a war in which there are no winners, and each person who is fighting to survive is not really living. The pain is real, the addiction is real , the violence is real , and the outcome is also very real. If you give into it you die, but sometimes it's easier to quit. "There is brutal silence in the night. Listen. They are screaming. Black is the fire in the city below the dark of the sky. Black is inhaling fire, exhaling smoke into base pipes hissing gripped liquid crack, burning until the hissing explodes...."/p pThis is a view of America from the eyes of a Black man, cold and angry. Here is a man who is not afraid to write about gentrification, racism, poverty, drug addiction and violence. Not only violence by police, but by his own race. This is a book in which the main character is not human, but a being driven to extinction by his own hand. What is the point of writing like this? It's the truth found in between the lines; he makes you work for it. This book is great in that it falls in line with other revolutionary writings such as uSolidad Brother/u by George Jackson, uOn a Mission/u by The Last Poets, and uAn Autobiography of Malcolm X/u . /ppThis book is for everyone. This book will open your eyes and challenge something inside of yourself: something called Freedom.br / /p/td/tr/td/tr/table/div/p