It’s all good, my man, and will be ultracool in the end.’ ” No life can be as tightly plotted as a novel, though, and the text sometimes moves unevenly from anecdote to unrelated (albeit interesting) anecdote, hindering a smooth narrative flow. Another is Myers’s wry commentary on his youthful actions and attitudes: when describing his spiritual uncertainty, for instance, he writes, “I wanted to hear a big voice on the phone say ‘Yea, verily, this is me, God. One of the book’s strengths, no surprise, is its careful and loving depiction of Harlem’s black community, and readers familiar with Myers’s other work will recognize in many of the figures and situations he describes the inspirations for his fiction. From a cozy childhood in the embrace of his foster parents to an alienated and depressed adolescence, Myers consciously sets out to identify those elements that made him what he is: a black writer of books for all children. Myers ( The Journal of Biddy Owens, below, etc.) paints a picture of a boy in love with words, an avid reader, and later an enthusiastic writer, but also one whose quick, violent temper kept him in constant trouble. Catalogues of books alternate with battles against educational authorities in this memoir from one of the deans of young-adult literature.
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