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Down some mean Australian streets Blood Guilt by Lindy Cameron, Harper Collins, 1999, pb., $15.30, 473 pp. Cat Catcher by Caroline Shaw, Bantam Books, 1999, pb., $16.40, 379 pp. Feeding the Demons by Gabrielle Lord, Hodder, 1999, pb., $18.58, 472 pp....

If you were among the nearly 11,000 people who lived in two-story row houses in north Camden, New Jersey, in the 1960s, you could walk to work at Esterbrook Pen, at Knox Gelatin, at RCA or at J.R. Evans Leather. You could shop...

Down These Mean Streets for me … is an account of the victory of innocent values over a dehumanizing environment. This innocence comes from Piri's complete immersion in life, and his absolute commitment to telling the full story without selective omission. Piri's innocence survives the baptism of the street because he arms it with a survival tool: chameleon-like self-assertion. Thus the self-conscious voice of the prologue—"I am My Majesty Piri Thomas"—carrie...

[The literary qualities of "Down These Mean Streets"] are primitive. Yet it has an undeniable power that I think comes from the fact that it is a report from the guts and heart of a submerged population group, itself submerged in the guts and hearts of our cities. It claims our attention and emotional response because of the honesty and pain of a life led in outlaw, fringe status, where the dream is always to escape. There is, in reports such as this, a certain lack of suspense. The reader kno...

[Down These Mean Streets] was a document about a special condition, a special place, a special man. It was dense with the specificity of his world, of his head, of the forces that played on them both, and it was told in a quasi-poetic argot that suited the material, added to the density…. Thomas has now, in the age of Attica, resurrected the essence of [a 70-page segment of Down These Mean Streets], retitled it Seven Long Times and told the story all over again….

This essay discusses the body of the Piri Thomas autobiography, "Down These Mean Streets." Examines psychological aspects of his childhood with some comparisons to Bandura's social cognitive theory and Erickson's theory of development and Nature vs. Nurture.