Hard Knocks - Hardcover

by Ray Lopez (Author), Paula Gill Lopez (Foreword by)

Hard Knocks: Memoir of a Small Moment is the story of one man's dynamic journey through life from birth until the day after his twenty-first birthday. It takes place during the 1960s and 1970s on Long Island in New York. From a Latino background, he takes us through his cultural confusion, as his parents tried to assimilate within a predominantly white community, and his confrontation with overt racism at school. It details the abusive environment he faced in Catholic school, his growing anger, and his fall into childhood alcoholism and delinquency. The Vietnam War, counterculture, and science provide a constant background for his growing awareness, choices, decisions, and delusions about the world and his own life. His alcoholism merges with drug addiction and he finds value and identity within a gang. The momentum of his life, balancing precariously between rebellious destruction and a search for artistic beauty and truth, takes the reader through the criminal justice and mental health systems, where the narrator awakens to the truth of Christ in his life.

Author Biography

Ray Lopez works as a mitigation specialist in capital cases after retiring from a twenty-six-year career as a federal probation officer. Born in Brooklyn in 1959 and raised on Long Island during the 1960s and 1970s, he journeyed through racism, Catholicism, counterculture, alcoholism, drug addiction, hospitalization, and jail to find hope in Christ. He earned his master's degree from UC Berkeley in English in 1988 and has only recently returned to creative writing.