num_pages: 256
description: First appearing in The New Yorker Danielle Allens Cuz announced the arrival of one of our most gifted literary memoirists. In this compassionate retelling of an abjectly tragic story (New York Times) Danielle Allena prize-winning scholarrecounts her heroic efforts to rescue Michael Alexander Allen her beloved baby cousin who was arrested at fifteen for an attempted carjacking. Tried as an adult and sentenced to thirteen years Michael served eleven. Three years later he was dead. Why did this gifted young man who dreamed of being a firefighter and a writer end up murdered? Why did he languish in prison? And why at fifteen was he in an alley in South Central Los Angeles holding a gun while trying to steal someones car? Hailed as a literary miracle (Washington Post) this fierce family memoir makes mass incarceration nothing less than a new American tragedy.
language: None
title: Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.
publisher: Liveright