{"product_id":"barless-a-bronx-memoir-paperback","title":"Barless: A Bronx Memoir - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBARLESS: A Bronx Memoir\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA raw, unsparing memoir of hunger, abandonment, and improvised family - told entirely in the voice of the boy who lived it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnthony Aleman was eleven, alone for days at a stretch on the fourteenth floor of a South Bronx tower, when he learned to stage his own apartment for the social worker: shovel out the dog waste, swallow toothpaste so his breath was clean, line the cabinets with cans no one was allowed to open. He was protecting his mother - a woman who had loved him once, and who was disappearing inch by inch behind a man, a drug, and a thing the boy could only name the Rot.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBARLESS is the account of the years that followed, written without hindsight and without mercy. In the flat present tense of a child who was never taught what he was supposed to feel, Aleman records a body burned in a stairwell, a father he meets just in time to watch him die, a high school with metal detectors and razor blades, foster placements and group homes, and a mother who walks past him on the street for three years without ever looking up.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd on a stoop across from the tower that erased him: a family that owed him nothing, teaching him to fight, to dance, to be Puerto Rican, to be loved.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom the crack-war Bronx to a hundred acres of Florida green to a convent in Syracuse, this is not a story about being saved. It is the record of a boy building a self out of whatever the street handed him.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe spent that childhood on a fourteenth-story windowsill with no bars on it. Nothing holding him in. Nobody there to catch him. He would escape one place after another before learning that a cage doesn't need bars.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat does a child become when nobody ever comes?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":68055797203167,"sku":"9798997177904","price":28.78,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/EcJigl3xx9798997177904.webp?v=1792115536","url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/products\/barless-a-bronx-memoir-paperback","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}