Bad Boy

Bad Boy: A Memoir

By Walter Dean Myers

AWARDS:
* National Book Award Finalist
* Notable Children's Books in the Language Arts (NCTE)
* Parents' Choice Gold Award

Myers, W. D. (2001). Bad boy: A memoir. New York: HaperTempest.

SYNOPSIS:
In Bad Boy, Walter Dean Myers presents his journey to manhood and his difficult path to becoming a writer. His story depicts the story of a black youth coming of age in Harlem during the 1950's. Myers offers up chapters which serve as snippets of his life. These chapters follow his life in more or less linear order, beginning with his earliest memories. Myers explores the issues of family, education, race, masculinity, and soci-economic status and the ways in which all of these aspects of his life intersect. Through a unique and very personal retelling of his young life and the important relationships within that life, Myers underscores the difficulties of adolscence. He explores the importance of reading and writing in his life and shows his quest to overcome barriers and presribed identity roles in order to be true to himself; for example, Myers states that "Being Afro-American, or black, was being imposed on me by people who had their own ideas of what those terms meant" (p. 177). This quotation demonstrates Myers resolve to create choices and opportunities with his life and to avoid being placed into confining categories. Finally, with this memoir, Myers also offers a living, breathing picture of Harlem in the 40s and 50s.


EVALUATION:
This book has so much to offer that it is difficult to know where to begin. Many of the chapters could stand alone and be used in a classroom to discuss a variety of things: Memoir writing, poverty, education, Harlem, narrative writing, racism, descriptive writing, gender issues, social constructivism, stereotypes, the value or purpose of writing and reading, etc.


CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS:
I would love to do this book as a read-aloud. It would be an interesting book to pause while reading and talk about predictions and possible meanings. I thought it might be interesting to pair Bad Boy with some of Michel de Montaigne's essays. I think these two would be very interesting together, both have a unique way of using personal experience or autobiographical writings to talk about highly intellectual ideas. It would also be interesting to make comparrisons between the genre and/or form devices of these two writers.


APPROPRIATE AGE RANGE:
9th grade and up.


PERSONAL REACTIONS:
I read this book while also reading Kozol's The Shame of the Nation, and it made me sad to think about how little has changed in regard to equaility within our education system. In some ways, this book also reminds me of Hope in the Unseen which I read last fall. It seems the more I read Walter Dean Myers the more I fall in love with him as a writer. He takes on challenging subjects and succeeds in addressing such subjects eloquently, entertainingly, authentically, and succinctly. He also manages to strike a balance between both adolescent and adult view points which makes his books appropriate for different developmental levels. I am a true fan of his work.