Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0807004235, Paperback)

When award-winning educator and activist Geoff Canada was growing up in the Bronx, the "sidewalk" boys learned the codes of the block from their elders and were ranked--and to some degree protected--through the rituals of fist, stick, and knife. Weaving in and out of his stark storytelling is a cogent anaylsis of how the complicity of gun manufacturers turned this contained violence into today's world of drive-by shootings and automatic weapons.

A Teacher's Guide for this book is available.

"The vignettes band together with a kind of clarifying momentum, so that the result is something more. . . . A beacon."


--New York Times Book Review
"A more powerful depiction of the tragic life of urban children and a more compelling plea to end' America's war against itself' cannot be imagined.


--Publishers Weekly
"Geoff Canada has been cultivating virtue, and hope, in children for the past 10 years."


--Newsweek
"A slim, revealing volume that should be required reading for anyone who was ever a child, for anyone who has ever negotiated the complicated hierarchy of 'rep' and revenge on city streets."


--Boston Globe
"Part memoir, part social treatise, a wholly sobering view of inner-city violence and the codes surrounding it."


--Kirkus Reviews