Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land" is the autobiography of a young man who grew up in Harlem. It is a Pilgrim's Progress through the deadly realities of the 28-year-old author's childhood and youth during the 1940's and 1950's. It brings to sharp focus and vivid life the desolations and survivals of his contemporaries during that dark night of the Negro soul.

It is written with brutal and unvarnished honesty in the plain talk of the people, in language that is fierce, uproarious, obscene and tender, but always sensible and direct. And to its enormous credit, this youthful autobiography gives us its devastating portrait of life without one cry of self-pity, outrage or malice, with no caustic sermons or searing rhetoric. Claude Brown speaks for himself—and the Harlem people to whom his life is bound—with open dignity and the effect is both shattering and deeply...