White Bucks and Black-Eyed Peas: Coming Of Age Black In White America [Hardcover]

Marcus Mabry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1995

Exploring what it means to be "young, black and talented" in America--and the high cost of teetering precariously between two separate worlds--Mabry examines the twentysomething experience, and chronicles the rise of a young black man--from his ghetto childhood through his Stanford education to his emergence as one of Newsweek's bright, young stars.

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

See all Editorial Reviews

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 (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,018,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A voice that is hard to place and a fine read, September 12, 2010

By 

Iris Rich "OfftheCuff" (Ann Arbor, MI United States) - See all my reviews

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

I am in the middle of reading the book. The voice of the book is hard to pin down yet it creates someone you instantly feel you know, as very good writing does. That it can do that is striking, since one premise is that the racial divide makes recognition elusive. I recognized a gay voice early. He hinted at not fitting into standard male bonding rituals--sports and interest in women. In a post-script, he comes out, suggesting he wasn't ready to do it in the book. That's interestng on the gaydar front, since I picked up his gayness very early in the book. He tells how boring Monday night was for him as a television addict, since all it had was Monday night football. One part I find interesting is that his account of the bleakness of his home's setting, the lack of connection to many of his "peers," the domestic squalor, conflict, and happiness mixed together, seems recognizable and universal. There is the alienation that coming-of-age stories for people who don't fit into their group typically describe. There is the bond to family that few can disown. Though the writing is very good, it is not quite great prose. But there is a talent for narrative (even when the book is arguable "diffuse" as one writer indicates)and a capacity to recover and report the feeling life had in Trenton for a black family in the 1980s. One sad feature of a book by a very well educated writer is that he uses "laid" for "lay" and "lay" for "lie." That mistake has become ubiquitous, creeping into the speech of people with first-class educations. I wish it could be stopped.

Finally, there is a sense that he was premature to write a memoir. It's true his views are still forming, and he is still experiencing the bends from his movement from a black underclass without prospects (in which his brother is trapped) to a world of privilege that remains mainly white. But he is a good writer so the report from the field, before he is fully matured, is strengthened by the sense of immediacy as he tries to organize the clashing juxtapositions of the worlds that were still making him. And, as a gay man, he has an outsider's perspective on much of what both worlds take for granted.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

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