The truthfulness of Down These Mean Streets goes beyond autobiographical integrity to illuminate not only that dubious concept, "the culture of poverty," but more importantly, the culture of Americans. (p. 4)

The book is punctuated with violence, and with fitful sex and the anesthetics of heroin as well. They end by engulfing the youth that Thomas writes about, but not his book. For these things are not perceived by him as "problems" or as a social outrage, but as elements of a rite de passage that he recalls now with an easy, even a proud, familiarity. Besides, his life was far more complicated and rich than sensational…. The really serious aspects of life were not drugs, but the unremitting and unavoidable struggle for status; not police brutality, but the terrible possibility that his father did not love him; not American racism, but the devastating thought that, being a dark-skinned...