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Notes on an All-American Family
by Mitchell Jackson
Award-winning author Mitchell S. Jackson takes us inside the drug-ravaged neighborhood and struggling family of his youth, while examining the cultural forces - large and small - that led him and his family to this place.
With a poet's gifted ear, a novelist's sense of narrative, and a journalist's unsentimental eye, Mitchell S. Jackson candidly explores his tumultuous youth in the other America. Survival Math takes its name from the calculations Mitchell and his family made to keep safe - to stay alive - in their community, a small black neighborhood in Portland, Oregon blighted by drugs, violence, poverty, and governmental neglect.
Survival Math is both a personal reckoning and a vital addition to the national conversation about race. Mitchell explores the Portland of his childhood, tracing the ways in which his family managed their lives in and around drugs, prostitution, gangs, and imprisonment as members of a tiny black population in one of the country's whitest cities. He discusses sex work and serial killers, gangs and guns, near-death experiences, composite fathers, the concept of "hustle," and the destructive power of drugs and addiction on family.
In examining the conflicts within his family and community, Jackson presents a microcosm of struggle and survival in contemporary urban America - an exploration of the forces that shaped his life, his city, and the lives of so many black men like him. As Jackson charts his own path from drug dealer to published novelist, he gives us a heartbreaking, fascinating, lovingly rendered view of the injustices and victories, large and small, that defined his youth.
"Starred Review. Thanks to Jackson's fresh voice, this powerful autobiography shines an important light on the generational problems of America's oft-forgotten urban communities." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Jackson's eloquent account is as much about a writer struggling to understand life's jubilations, mistakes, and losses, as it is a chronicle of a black man's place in America, appealing to fans of Kiese Laymon and Ta-Nehisi Coates." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. A potent book that revels in the author's truthful experiences while maintaining the jagged-grain, keeping-it-a-100, natural storytelling that made The Residue Years a modern must-read." - Kirkus
"Survival Math is the best memoir I've read in ages...I had the feeling while reading it that I'd never read anything quite like it before. It's intimate and wise; poignant and compassionate; redemptive and raw. You have to read this beautiful book." - Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
"Survival Math is a compassionate meditation on the human costs of this country's ongoing war on black lives, and - more importantly - the methods we employ to endure despite it all. Mitchell Jackson calls on his singular linguistic gifts to craft this story of redemption and maturation with honesty and style." - Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House
"Jackson is no mere stylist. His prose is conceived from fabric to fit. Penetrating social critique, rigorous self-examination, epochs and eras attired with a craftsmanship that seems effortless: By every measure, Survival Math is ahead of the curve." - Greg Pardlo, author of Air Traffic and Digest
"In Survival Math, Mitchell Jackson turns a familial story into an American one, writing with brutal honesty about himself, and the men and women who shaped him ... Jackson reminds us to remember the words of Whitman: Vivas to those who have failed. Written in a prose that's distinctly his own." - Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Bastards of the Reagan Era and A Question of Freedom
"In Survival Math, Mitchell Jackson pens a honest, first-hand account of a family caught up in the game. This book is like no other in the singular way that Jackson unpacks their lives with a rare eloquence and intelligence, spinning a tale that is by turns sad, horrifying, illuminating, and uplifting. In short: a dope book by a dope writer." - Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank and Rails Under My Back
"Jackson's mesmerizing voice and style draws you into the survival calculations for millions of American kids and families, revealing a need-to-know reality for all of us. With ravenous curiosity Jackson explores what he's had to learn - and sometimes unlearn - about what it means to be a man and what it means to be human, investigating why and how he survived when many have not." - Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black
"Mitchell Jackson's Survival Math is riveted by his exacting and tender calculus of each subject's depth and humanity. Jackson's musings skillfully illuminate the bloodlines, both inherited and earned, that pulse through the body of America's gang-graffitied carceral state." - Tyehimba Jess, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olio
This information about Survival Math was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of Survival Math. His debut novel The Residue Years was praised by publications, including The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Times (London). The novel won the Ernest Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence, and it was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jackson's honors include fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, TED, the Lannan Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Salon, and Tin House, among other publications. He serves on the faculty at New York University and Columbia University.
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