ny times columnist charles blow interviewed on msnbc

NY Times columnist Charles Blow was recently interviewed on MSNBC’s ‘The last word with Lawrence O’Donnell’. Watch the writer discuss his new memoir, ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’; a book which has many hailing the writer as the new James Baldwin. In the book, Blow reveals both a past of sexual abuse, and a struggle with bisexuality.

“A gorgeous, moving memoir of how one of America’s most innovative and respected journalists found his voice by coming to terms with a painful past
New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow mines the compelling poetry of the out-of-time African-American Louisiana town where he grew up — a place where slavery’s legacy felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders’ stories and in the near-constant wash of violence.
Blow’s attachment to his mother — a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, a job plucking poultry at a nearby factory, a soon-to-be-ex husband, and a love of newspapers and learning — cannot protect him from secret abuse at the hands of an older cousin. It’s damage that triggers years of anger and searing self-questioning.
Finally, Blow escapes to a nearby state university, where he joins a black fraternity after a passage of brutal hazing, and then enters a world of racial and sexual privilege that feels like everything he’s ever needed and wanted, until he’s called upon, himself, to become the one perpetuating the shocking abuse.
A powerfully redemptive memoir that both fits the tradition of African-American storytelling from the South, and gives it an indelible new slant.”

http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Shut-Up-My-Bones/dp/0544228049