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….

Piri Thomas in his autobiography, Down These Mean Streets, describes the passionate, painful search to validate his manhood for which, with dead-pan cool, he had to fight, steal, submit to buggery, open his veins to any drug, take any dare, any risk. He has done it all in Harlem's mean streets and gone on from machismo to manhood, acquiring during the journey an understanding of man. This is not a confirmation ritual imposed by what the sociologists call the "barrio subculture." This is...

For those familiar with Down These Mean Streets, reading Piri Thomas' new book, Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand is an interesting but disappointing experience…. [While] the former is strong and vital, the latter never really comes together as a living unified work. Theoretically it is the sequel which should be the more powerful. It recounts the struggle in the early 1960's of a young Puerto Rican, embittered by poverty, drug addiction, prison and racism, to establish in his life some degr...

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 r...

["Down These Mean Streets"] is both vigorous and compelling. A very uneven book, it is nonetheless consistently readable…. "Down These Mean Streets" is coarse and crude. But this is perhaps as it should be. Life for the Piri Thomases of the United States is not pleasant and cultivated. It is primitive and base….

Down These Mean Streets dramatically captured and transmitted the reality of growing up in the Puerto Rican "Barrio" district of New York during the 1940s and 1950s. Graphically the author etched the panorama of East Harlem, the color and noises and passions and moods that coalesced among its teeming tenements…. A testimony of almost total recall, Down These Mean Streets captured the inner conflict facing a youth who hoped to achieve self-esteem and respect in this environment without s...

Piri Thomas's ability to combine in a character youthful innocence with street wisdom, an ability so well displayed in Down These Mean Streets, sometimes fails him [in Stories from El Barrio]. In "Mighty Miguel," for example, a boy's fantasies too closely resemble a drug user's dreams. In "The Blue Wings and the Puerto Rican Knights," also, the violence committed by clownish gang fighters does not seem shocking or tragic but just unbelievable. The author simp...

Get this book as soon as possible. That's the best advice this reviewer can give. Savior, Savior Hold My Hand will be called urban ethnic history, social psychology, sociology, etc.; but it is, in fact, an excellent literary account of Puerto Rican life in America. As a sequel to Thomas' successful Down These Mean Streets, this work continues the story of a dark Puerto Rican's struggle to avoid the disasters of drugs, prostitution, crime, gang wars, etc….