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Air traffic : a memoir of ambition and manhood in America / Gregory Pardlo.

by Pardlo, Gregory.

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Alfred A. Knopf, c2018.

Pardlo, Gregory.

Pardlo, Gregory -- Family.

Authors, Black -- 20th century -- Biography.

Authors, American -- 20th century -- Family relationships.

Fathers and sons -- United States.

9781524731762 (hbk.)

9780525432210 (pbk.)

x, 253 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 22 cm

An introduction: Rt. 66 -- The up-to-daters club -- Student union -- Loser -- What is your quest? -- Air traffic -- The minority business consortium -- Cartography -- A moving violation -- Marine boy -- The wreck of the conquest -- He ain't heavy -- "Hurrah for Schoelcher!" -- Colored people's time -- Private school -- Tolle, Lege -- Behind the wheel -- The strip -- On Intervention.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, his first work of prose: a deeply felt memoir of a family's bonds and a meditation on race, addiction, fatherhood, ambition, and American culture The Pardlos were an average, middle-class African American family living in a New Jersey Levittown: charismatic Gregory Sr., an air traffic controller, his wife, and their two sons, bookish Greg Jr. and musical-talent Robbie. But when "Big Greg" loses his job after participating in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Strike of 1981, he becomes a disillusioned, toxic, looming presence in the household--and a powerful rival for young Greg. While Big Greg succumbs to addiction and exhausts the family's money, Greg Jr. rebels--he joins a boot camp for prospective Marines, follows a woman to Denmark, drops out of college again and again, and yields to alcoholism. Years later, he falls for a beautiful, no-nonsense woman named Ginger and becomes a parent himself. Then, he finally grapples with the irresistible yet ruinous legacy of masculinity he inherited from his father. In chronicling his path to recovery and adulthood--Gregory Pardlo gives us a compassionate, loving ode to his father, to fatherhood, and to the frustrating-yet-redemptive ties of family, as well as a scrupulous, searing examination of how African American manhood is shaped by contemporary American life.

Autobiographies.

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