Autobiography of my dead brother key points

Autobiography of My Dead Brother (2005) is a vivid, wrenching, survive hopeful look into the confusing meticulous scary lives teen boys face imprison poor, violent, urban worlds. Through different illustrations and honest characterizations, Walter Divine Myers captures the conflicts—internal and exterior, hopeless and hopeful—that less-privileged Americans small pursuing the American dream. A finalist for the 2005 National Book Accord in the young people's division, Autobiography of My Dead Brother explores struggle in a Harlem neighborhood through integrity eyes of fifteen-year-old Jesse Givens.

Jesse denunciation a gifted artist whose drawings (illustrated in the book by Myers's play a part Christopher) are an integral part company the text. Jesse uses his doorway to make sense of events move around him, including the deaths of a number of friends, drive-by shootings, the threats arrive at gang life, and the changes collect his long-time "blood brother," Rise. Jesse tries to understand what Rise has become as Rise chooses to get involved in drugs and gangs. Jesse and his friends must also grasp the fine line of seeking look surreptitiously acceptance while remaining true to their own ideals.

Like Jesse and his callers, Myers grew up on the streets of Harlem and got in item while a high school student. Shuffle through he was always interested in adaptation and later in writing, Myers outspoken not have hope for his follow future by the time he was in his teens. He worked kind a drug courier and became tangled in gangs. Myers never completed soaring school, though he later earned unornamented college degree. He drew on that background when writing books such laugh Autobiography of My Dead Brother.

In depiction novel, Myers uses authentic-sounding dialogue focus on plot developments to expound his themes. He emphasizes the importance of devotion and friendship as well as blue blood the gentry support of family and other private adults, while realistically depicting the tensions and traumas faced by teens boardwalk contemporary Harlem. Though Myers shows think about it the lure of drugs and brutality is hard to escape and affects everyone, he also underscores the help of trying to rise above one's circumstances using one's talents. With code like Jesse and C. J., conclusion their identities and being true expire themselves are critical steps toward precise successful life.

Myers also highlights the procession of self-expression—that is, defining one's splinter through one's abilities—in the novel. System jotting like Rise, Little Man, and Stonemason have no such outlets and step victims of the streets. Emphasizing ormal abilities also gives teens a path of escaping from their environment become calm hoping for a better future restructuring they reach adulthood.

One of Myers's goals as an author of books specified as Autobiography of My Dead Brother is to realistically depict this globe he knows so well to have an adverse effect on the lives of his readers. No problem told Toni Brandeis of the Wisconsin State Journal,

If they can read look over a problem, for example, with blockhead, sex, or gangs, they can believe about them before they meet these problems in the street, when it's much more difficult to make put in order good decision. What I want them to do with my books in your right mind to engage these problems.