The author of Fist Stick Knife Gun brings powerful new insight to the lives of boys in America today: "More and more I have become concerned with what boys think they should be, and what they believe it means to be a man." He lays out the little-understood history of drugs and their marketing to inner-city boys and takes a hard look at the issue of too-early sex, showing us, through a pointed story of his own sexual education on the streets, how the combination of age-old urges with new cultural forces and mores has created a volatile sexual terrain for boys. Canada writes indelibly of the young boy he once was and of the crucial issues ófatherhood, healing, mentors, self-esteem, faith, and more óthat must be negotiated as boys in America reach up for manhood.

Boys are conditioned not to let on that it hurts, never to say, "I'm still scared." I have come to see that in teaching boys to deny their own pain we inadvertently teach them to deny the pain of others. . . . We must remember to tell them, "I know it hurts. Come let me hold you. I'll hold you until it stops. And if you find out that the hurt comes back, I'll hold you again. I'll hold you until you're healed."

"Reaching Up for Manhood took me by surprise, because it is so tender, and so unpretentious, and so personal. It's a beautiful story, simply told óhonest, deeply sensitive, and morally empowering óby one of the few authentic heroes of New York and one of the best friends children have, or ever will have, in our nation."

—Jonathan Kozol...

When award-winning educator and activist Geoff Canada was growing up in the Bronx, the "sidewalk" boys learned the codes of the block from their elders and were ranked--and to some degree protected--through the rituals of fist, stick, and knife. Weaving in and out of his stark storytelling is a cogent anaylsis of how the complicity of gun manufacturers turned this contained violence into today's world of drive-by shootings and automatic weapons.

A Teacher's Guide for this book is available.

"The vignettes band together with a kind of clarifying momentum, so that the result is something more. . . . A beacon."


--New York Times Book Review
"A more powerful depiction of the tragic life of urban children and a more compelling plea to end' America's war against itself' cannot be imagined.


--Publishers Weekly
"Geoff Canada has been cultivating virtue, and hope, in children for the past 10 years."


--Newsweek
"A slim, revealing volume that should be required reading for anyone who was ever a child, for anyone who has ever negotiated the complicated hierarchy of 'rep' and revenge on city streets."


--Boston Globe
"Part memoir, part social treatise, a wholly sobering view of inner-city violence and the codes surrounding it."


--Kirkus Reviews...