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Black Fire is a well-told, scathing story and it resounds with a sense of justice.
Completely absorbing. . . . Peery is s superb storyteller with an imaginative grasp of African American witticisms, song, and folklore.
In places the book is Wolfean or Whitmanesque, suffused with an awareness and an optimism that have become unfashionable in American writing.
A riveting coming-of-age memoir . . . [Peery’s] sparse, direct, sinewy prose pulses with passion and eloquence.
Peery writes with intelligence, grace, and humor. His autobiography provides not only a portrait of a fascinating life but a history of 20th-century black radicalism.
Recommended . . . a gripping, highly personal story.
Black Fire
The Making of an American Revolutionary
paperback
$19.95
—San Francisco Chronicle
Available in paperback for the first time, Black Fire is a personal account of one soldier’s political awakening. In prose the Washington Post hailed as “Wolfean or Whitmanesque,” Peery writes eloquently of the passions that led him to fight abroad for opportunities denied him at home.
Whether describing his childhood in rural Minnesota, the people and places he encounters as a teenage adventurer on freight trains heading west, or his tour of duty as a soldier in the all-black 83rd Infantry Division, Peery’s is “a deftly told story about a young man’s political and social consciousness” (San Francisco Chronicle).
Nelson Peery was born in 1923 in St. Joseph, Missouri. He grew up in rural Minnesota as one of seven sons of a postal worker in the only African American family in town. After fighting in World War II, Peery joined the Communist Party and was a member for eight years. Upon leaving the Party, he continued his activity as a political revolutionary for many years. The author of the award-winning memoir Black Radical (The New Press), among other works, he lives in Chicago.
Fall 1995
paperback
6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 352 pages
978-1-56584-159-8
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