White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas: Coming Of Age Black In White America (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: White City, New York, New Jersey (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mabry, a 27-year-old foreign correspondent for Newsweek, joins the stream of black male memoirists with this diffuse, partly affecting tale of his path from the ghetto to a sometimes precarious place in the white mainstream. It is by now a familiar story, so the challenge is in the telling. Mabry writes fluidly enough about his isolated youth near Trenton, N.J.: "My grandmother and my encyclopedias were my best friends." He cites the help of his self-sacrificing yet self-defeating mother, as well as government aid, as the source of his success. Most of this book, however, concerns Mabry's rewarding but rocky times as a scholarship prep-school student at Lawrenceville (N.J.) and as an undergraduate at Stanford, plus his entree into France and a budding career at Newsweek. Some of his anecdotes are illuminating; for example, his tale of rejection by Stanford blacks and his criticism of "the galloping paranoia" against political correctness. However, as he closes his memoir with a scene of reconciliation with his long-estranged father and his struggling brother, it seems Mabry might have waited a bit longer to sort it all into perspective.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

By the time Mabry, a Newsweek Paris correspondent, was born in 1967, Martin Luther King had less than a year to live and the civil rights movement was splintering. The heroes of Mabry's story are the stubborn women who raised him: his pragmatic grandmother Merle Thomas, who moved her family from rural Georgia to West Palm Beach, Florida, to a working-class suburb of Trenton, New Jersey; and his mother Jerrilynn, unable to realize her own educational and show-biz dreams but committed to keeping her son's options unlimited. Both women worked when they could, but Uncle Sam sometimes kept their family fed. Money from Jerrilynn's drug-dealer boyfriend paid for cherished Christmas presents. When Mabry qualified for Lawrenceville (a ritzy, mostly WASP boarding school), exchange student status in France (Stanford University and the Sorbonne), and job offers from Newsweek and other leading mainstream publications, he learned firsthand what W. E. B. Du Bois meant by "double consciousness." Is Mabry too young to write a memoir? Sure. Does he have important things to tell readers, whatever our age and race? Definitely. A penetrating, gracefully written dissection of life on the racial and generational cusp. Mary Carroll

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1 edition (August 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684196697
• ISBN-13: 978-0684196695
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,959,064 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Reminiscent..Moving, December 15, 2008

By	Marlo L. Austell "Childhood friend" (Burlington NJ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas: Coming of Age Black in White America (Paperback)

I write this review not only as a reader but I'm a childhood friend of the author and so the first night I read I laughed so hard I couldn't breath..the next night I cried..And yet with all of those emotions I managed to allow myself to take in his journey through his words...I have since tried to contact Marcus...without success...hopefully he will read this so that maybe I can tell him personally how much I really enjoyed his memior