Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and author of Cuz and Our Declaration, winner of the Parkman Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"A literary miracle of form and content. The book pleads with us to
find the moral imagination to break the American pattern of racial
abuse. Allen’s ambitious, breathtaking book challenges the moral
composition of the world it inhabits by telling all who listen: I
loved my cousin and he loved me, and I know he’d be alive if you
loved him, too."
*Kiese Laymon - Washington Post*
"A compassionate retelling of an abjectly tragic story...Among the
most valuable contributions Allen makes is forcing us to ask: To
what end are we locking up our children? Are we not foreclosing
their options before their lives have even begun?...Allen’s
analysis of gang culture—or “the parastate,” as she calls it, with
its own bylaws and tragic form of appeal—may be where she’s at her
ferocious best"
*Jennifer Senior - New York Times*
""[Cuz] address[es] issues worth pondering: how codes of
masculinity constrain and cripple men, the lure of violence, the
mysteries of human personality and the debts family members owe one
another in dire circumstances…In writing about her cousin, Allen is
also elegizing other black men victimized by poverty, drugs and
unequal justice. Her blend of personal anguish and social
consciousness evokes not just [John Edgar] Wideman, but Jesmyn
Ward's 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped.""
*Julia M. Klein - Chicago Tribune*
"Allen’s memoir, Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A., is a
doleful and stirring narrative of how Michael Allen Alexander’s
magnetic smile slowly dimmed until he was found shot to death in
the passenger seat of a car in Los Angeles…. Allen’s heartbreak
gives way to a well-researched expedition."
*Otis R. Taylor, Jr. - San Francisco Chronicle*
"She’s rightfully angry at what happened to her cousin, but it
doesn’t hide her empathy for families who endure hardship to visit
their imprisoned loved ones, and it doesn’t lessen her humanity
toward the people whose imprisonment doesn’t make sense. That,
mixed with an aching, soaring joy are what you’ll find in 'Cuz,'
and it’s going to make you think—hard. Can you afford to miss that?
No, make no mistake."
*Terri Schlichenmeyer - Oakland Post*
"The shattering story of her young cousin…'Cuz' is a powerful
family memoir and study of the criminal justice system."
*Tom Beer - Newsday*
"Allen, whose writing is creative and accessible, uses her finely
tuned talent to fold Michael’s fate into the gathering storms of
the U.S. criminal-justice system and Los Angeles’ gang-related and
racial turmoil. Both a searching, personal elegy and a sure-footed
lamentation of the systems meant to protect us, this is a searing
must-read."
*Annie Bostrom - Booklist, Starred review*
"[Allen] puts a face to the numbing statistics of incarcerated
young black boys and men. . . . At its heart, Allen’s book is both
an outcry and entreaty as she grapples with a painful reality."
*Publishers Weekly*
"A literary and political event like Toni Morrison’s Playing in the
Dark, Danielle Allen’s Cuz is an elegiac memoir and social jeremiad
born out of the tragedy of mass incarceration. A loving cousin
paying tribute to her brilliant and beloved but troubled 'cuz,'
Allen hits a grand slam."
*Henry Louis Gates Jr., Director of the Hutchins Center for African
and African American Research at Harvard University, and host of
the PBS series Finding Your Roots*
"What starts as a personal memoir, an effort to resurrect from
oblivion a beloved cousin who died young, modulates in Allen’s
hands into a cool, reasoned, but ultimately devastating indictment
of the War on Drugs and the sentencing regime it has given birth
to. In plain terms, stripped of the jargon of the social sciences,
she shows us what can await if you are young, black, and unlucky in
today’s United States."
*J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of The Life and Times of
Michael K*
"In this narrative of freedom and incarceration, education and
disadvantage, rehabilitation and punishment, Danielle Allen paints
an unforgettable portrait of a cousin she loved. The pacing is
brisk and novelistic, but the message is large and clear: we need
urgently to reform the system through which we process juveniles
who commit crime, because the current system perpetuates the very
injustices it was designed to address."
*Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday
Demon and Far from the Tree*
"Cuz is riveting, painfully personal, and profoundly lucid in its
history telling. Allen's crystalline voice amazes despite the most
bewildering behemoth topic."
*Quiara Alegría Hudes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Water by
the Spoonful*
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