Honky

Rating:
Summary: Smart, funny, and thought-provoking
Review: Honky is a great read. Conley is trained as a sociologist, and he brings the insights of his profession to his life story, but primarily he is a story-teller. Highly recommended

Rating:
Summary: His "project" was a step up from where I lived
Review: I also lived on the lower east side. Compared to the project where I lived, Masaryk Towers was a step up. Conley mentions the brown bricks of the projects but does not mention until later in the narrative the yellow bricks of Masaryk. The yellow bricks can be viewed as its difference from the projects in the area.

Conley makes it sound as if he's practically the only white person around. There were other whites in Masaryk and some whites lived in the housing projects as well. In addition, as Conley has a Jewish background, I'm surprised that he did not (unless I somehow missed it) mention the large Jewish community on the other side of the bridge right near his home.

I didn't like that Conley said that the names of the projects such as Riis and Wald have little meaning to the people who lived there. Many people live in places and have no idea whom they're named after.

I also didn't like that he insinuated that you could not get an education on the lower east side. I've had teachers who've inspired me to excel.

I've given this book 3 stars because it brought me back to the old neighborhood. The Pioneer supermarket, the luncheonette. These were part of my daily existence. Yet I think he was too hard on the Lower East Side. There is hope there.

Rating:
Summary: A GREAT BOOK ABOUT RACE AND CLASS
Review: I am reading this book for my sociology course and think it is one of the most absorbing memoirs I have ever read. I suggest it very highly.

Rating:
Summary: Not another book about the projects.
Review: I am so tierd of movies, books, and tv shows about the projects. I know that they exsist and that people live there. It is very tragic that people don't have enogh sense to form a better life for their families. Dalton seems like a great character, and I would liked to have been friends with him. I would have never entered his neighborhood. I didn't like the book, and I only gave it three stars because my teacher would have cried.

Rating:
Summary: what i like or dislike about honky ( antoinette vargas)
Review: I enjoyed reading Honky a lot. Why? because it deals with things that happen in his life but that you can see happen at this point in life right now. I liked it 'cause it's a realistic book. It talks about school is when you're the new kid, or the only kind of race at that school. What i liked was that honky had his best friend and wasn't white like him. That showed that not 'cause your one race your friends have to be the same race. I thought that most of our friends are the same race and color that we're. But i don't think that anymore. I have friends that are White, Black, Mexicans and etc. I liked that chapter about when he uses his emergency money for things that he shouldn't buy. I loved that chapter 'cause it talks about what a little kid would do just to try and get what they want. I don't dislike anything about it just that some chapters are not interesting.

Rating:
Summary: what i like or dislike about honky ( antoinette vargas)
Review: I enjoyed reading Honky a lot. Why? because it deals with things that happen in his life but that you can see happen at this point in life right now. I liked it 'cause it's a realistic book. It talks about school is when you're the new kid, or the only kind of race at that school. What i liked was that honky had his best friend and wasn't white like him. That showed that not 'cause your one race your friends have to be the same race. I thought that most of our friends are the same race and color that we're. But i don't think that anymore. I have friends that are White, Black, Mexicans and etc. I liked that chapter about when he uses his emergency money for things that he shouldn't buy. I loved that chapter 'cause it talks about what a little kid would do just to try and get what they want. I don't dislike anything about it just that some chapters are not interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: I enjoyed reading this book, largely because I too am a white person who grew up in an African-Carribean neighborhood. The book helped me to reframe some of my experiences and many of the things he said resonnated with me. I, for the first time, began to understand my white priveledge in the larger world even though I had never really had a sense of this before. Some of the writing in the book was a bit awkward and there was no mention of romantic relationships or dating and how this is effected by being the minority in the neighborhood. Overall, this was a worthy read.

Rating:
Summary: CONFUSING AND TROUBLING
Review: I found this book both conmfusing and troubling. As a black man who grew up on the Lower East Side of New York, I find conley's observations out of sync with my own. First of all: the Masaryk Towers--the "project" where he lived--was not a PUBLIC housing project, nor was it low income. Its population was far more mixed than the projects where I grew up. His stories, while well written at times, seem forced--as if to prove a point: white people have privileges that black people do not. I think we know this already.

As a person of color, I felt a bit hurt by the book's constant opposition between white sucess and black failure. If it's stereotypes the author is trying to attack, he sure doesn't succeed. Black people are type cast in this racial drama. My life growing up was filled with rituals, joy, ideas. His picture of black life is filled with anger, tragedy, and sadness. Where is the positive, complex side of black life on the Lower East Side.

As for the book's title: I've never called ANYONE honky. Was Conley called honky? The title of the book--like so many of Conley's stories--typecasts black people in a confusing and troubling way. Our lives are as complicated as white people's. I wish this book had shown this. Too bad. I think Conley means well. He just doesn't get it.

Rating:
Summary: interesting but not completely honest
Review: I found this to be an interesting and frustrating book. Dalton is a decent, though self-indulgent writer, who is able to create good narrative momentum. He has some interesting if not very deep things to say about race and class and childhood. But everything positive about the book was deeply undermined for me because it contains a great deal of factual error and distortion. I know this because my family figures prominently in his story. He was my brother's best friend during a critical period of their childhoods, which Dalton recounts at considerable length. And much of what he says is simply wrong. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he wrote things as he remembers them and did not deliberately embellish the story. But the inaccuracies are significant because they pertain to the very heart of what he is trying to say. When Dalton transferred to PS41, he moved into a very different socioeconomic sphere, and the contrast between his earlier experiences and the new world he entered affected him deeply. Those contrasts--and the meanings he draws from them--are a great deal of what he tries to make sense of in the book. And that is what makes his inaccuracies so troubling. The portrait he paints of my family is of an extremely privileged, wealthy clan of economic and cultural elitists. That makes a better story, but it is also false. It makes me wonder just how accurate his other memories are. Is what he says about other people, places, and experiences as distorted as what he says about my family? His book is a clear lesson in just how subjective and unreliable memoirs are as sources of information about anything or anyone other than their authors. If you read this book, you'll know what Dalton thinks his childhood was like. No more, no less.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, fast read.
Review: I immediately went out and bought Honky after a friend told me about it. I attended the same schools as the author, was friendly with Jerome (a friend of Dalton's when he was growing up), and grew up in Mitchell-Lama buildings on Avenue A (which clearly is not Avenue D, but had much of the same flavor.) I loved the remembrances of the neighborhood (the boom-boxes with record players inside, and the snapping contests) and he was honest and sincere about personal problems during adolescence. It was very distracting, however, when he broke from the story to give the "sociologist's point of view." Not only was it full of jargon, but I didn't find that it added any particular insight to what was a powerful story is itself. Did he really need to apologize for calling his apartment a "ghetto penthouse" when he was 12 years old? If the memoir were to really provoke thought, ideas on the way race and class are organized would come from the stories themselves, not from the author putting on his social scientist hat. Lastly, I didn't feel that the author was completely honest about the make-up of his buildings. He did explain that they were separate from the projects, but he never mentioned a single white person living in the building, when in reality there were many. His points at the end of the book on selective memory are valid, but THE main theme of this book is race, and I feel that the author cut some descriptive corners to make sociological points.