The pacing is brisk and novelistic, but the message is large and clear: we need urgently to reform the system through which we process juveniles who commit crime, because the current system perpetuates the very injustices it was designed to address., "" address issues worth pondering: how codes of masculinity constrain and cripple men, the lure of violence, the mysteries of human personality and the debts family members owe one another in dire circumstances.In writing about her cousin, Allen is also elegizing other black men victimized by poverty, drugs and unequal justice. In this narrative of freedom and incarceration, education and disadvantage, rehabilitation and punishment, Danielle Allen paints an unforgettable portrait of a cousin she loved. In this Ellisonian story of a young African American man's coming-of-age in late twentieth-century America, and of the family who will always love Michael, we learn how we lost an entire generation. The corrosive entanglements of gang warfare, combined with a star-crossed love for a gorgeous woman driving a gold Mercedes, would ultimately be Michael's undoing. As Cuz heartbreakingly reveals, even Allen's devotion, as unwavering as it was, could not save Michael from the brutal realities encountered by newly released young men navigating the streets of South Central. When she finally welcomed her baby cousin home, she adopted the role of cousin on duty, devotedly supporting Michael's fresh start while juggling the demands of her own academic career. Throughout her cousin Michael's eleven years in prison, Danielle Allen-who became a dean at the University of Chicago at the age of thirty-two-remained psychically bonded to her self-appointed charge, visiting Michael in prison and corresponding with him regularly. At thirteen, sensitive, talkative Michael Allen was suddenly tossed into this cauldron, a violent world where he would be tried at fifteen as an adult for an attempted carjacking, and where he would be sent, along with an entire generation, cascading into the spiral of the Los Angeles prison system. but virtually every urban center in the nation. Why? Why did her cousin, a precocious young man who dreamed of being a firefighter and a writer, end up dead? Why did he languish in prison? And why, at the age of fifteen, was he in an alley in South Central Los Angeles, holding a gun while trying to steal someone's car? Cuz means both "cousin" and "because." In this searing memoir, Allen unfurls a new American story about a world tragically transformed by the sudden availability of narcotics and the rise of street gangs-a collision, followed by a reactionary War on Drugs, that would devastate not only South Central L.A. In a shattering work that shifts between a woman's private anguish over the loss of her beloved baby cousin and a scholar's fierce critique of the American prison system, Danielle Allen seeks answers to what, for many years, felt unanswerable.
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