Street Shadows

Starred review from January 25, 2010
In this spectacular debut, Iowa Workshop grad Walker, an African American professor of English, contrasts his misspent youth in the Chicago projects with his adult life as a college professor and family man. Moving back and forth fluidly through time, Walker creates a vivid sense of character, his own and those around him, as well as the standard pitfalls of ghetto life he narrowly avoided. The result is a funny, poignant, thoughtful and exceptionally well-written memoir that follows Walker from Chicago to Africa and locations across the U.S., each of which is crisply, authentically captured. While delivering a thorough, personal take on race relations, opportunity, and privilege, Walker hooks readers with his prose and honesty, without plying for sympathy or playing to readers' preconceptions. With broad appeal and pertinent timing, Walker's first effort could be the pick-it-up and pass-it-on memoir of the season.

December 15, 2009
Humorous, provocative tale of a young black writer racing past personal and historical demons.

In his debut, Walker (English/Bridgewater State Coll.) deftly subverts expectations of urban angst and braggadocio. The author begins on Chicago's South Side. As a wannabe gangster, Walker learned that his friendly neighborhood cocaine dealer was shot to death an hour after giving him drugs on credit. The author then backtracks from this violent opening to limn his unusual childhood. His parents were both blind, but also followers of a doomsday cult which assured the youthful Walker that the end of the world was near. When this failed to materialize, the nerdy, disillusioned adolescent fell under the sway of his raffish brothers and thuggish neighbors. They all seemed headed down a familiar path of degradation. Somehow, however, Walker always gravitated toward situations that offered opportunities for redemption, despite the temptations of cocaine, alcohol, abusive women and pointless street violence. As an older student at a local community college, Walker received advice from one of his teachers to transfer to the University of Iowa. Once there, he felt baffled by the school's Midwestern snobbery and, more generally, by race—his encounters with whites and fellow blacks often ended in wounded puzzlement. Walker's fresh take on the labyrinth of urban race relations is one of his memoir's great pleasures."I came to believe, at a very early age," he writes,"that in order to succeed I would have to beat the system through the mastery of some criminal enterprise, or join it in the form of a Sambo, a sell-out, an Oreo." After acceptance and acclaim at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Walker got married and became a father, yet continued to fear that success, as both a writer and a black man, would always elude him. The book's somber concluding chapters, in which he recalls the many companions from his confused youth who are now dead or in jail, clarifies how such fears are entirely warranted.

Several cuts above standard memoirs.

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November 15, 2009
I am a racist, Walker declares halfway through this thoughtful memoir, and much of the book is spent building up to and unpacking that statement. Born poor on the South Side of Chicago, Walker became an honor student, which made him vulnerable; and in defense, he succumbed to the urban undertow. A violent opening puts it all into play: drugs, sex, guns, gangs, and chance. But this is a feint; Walker pulls back from the salacious parts of his past to focus on his university education in Iowa City, his growth as a writer, his beginnings as a teacher, and the fairly banal struggles of being the rare black English professor at an East Coast college. The chapters alternate between his crime-filled youth and his increasingly egalitarian life of sushi dinners and awkward Kwanzaa faculty events, with the latter taking prominence. This will frustrate those looking for a gritty urban drama, but thats the pointas Walker realizes, his tale of black teenage delinquency seemed too clich'd. This unique literary biography, however, is nothing of the sort.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)