{"product_id":"9780544570115","title":"Fire Shut Up in My Bones","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA gorgeous, moving memoir of how one of America's most innovative and respected journalists found his voice by coming to terms with a painful past \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNew York Times columnist Charles M. Blow mines the compelling poetry of the out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where he grew up -- a place where slavery's legacy felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders' stories and in the near-constant wash of violence.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBlow's attachment to his mother -- a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, a job plucking poultry at a nearby factory, a soon-to-be-ex husband, and a love of newspapers and learning -- cannot protect him from secret abuse at the hands of an older cousin. It's damage that triggers years of anger and searing self-questioning.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFinally, Blow escapes to a nearby state university, where he joins a black fraternity after a passage of brutal hazing, and then enters a world of racial and sexual privilege that feels like everything he's ever needed and wanted, until he's called upon, himself, to become the one perpetuating the shocking abuse.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA powerfully redemptive memoir that both fits the tradition of African-American storytelling from the South, and gives it an indelible new slant.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Houghton Mifflin Harcourt","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47026211193072,"sku":"9780544570115","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780544570115_p0.jpg?v=1763712698","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780544570115","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}