Cuz

What starts as a personal memoir, an effort to resurrect from oblivion a beloved cousin who died young, modulates in Allen's hands into a cool, reasoned, but ultimately devastating indictment of the War on Drugs and the sentencing regime it has given birth to. In plain terms, stripped of the jargon of the social sciences, she shows us what awaits you if you are young, black, and unlucky in today's United States.

J. M. COETZEE

A literary and political event like Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, Allen’s Cuz is an elegiac memoir and social jeremiad born out of the tragedy of mass incarceration. A loving cousin paying tribute to her brilliant and beloved but troubled "cuz," Allen hits a grand slam.

HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.

In this narrative of freedom and incarceration, education and disadvantage, rehabilitation and punishment, Danielle Allen paints an unforgettable portrait of a cousin she loved. The pacing is brisk and novelistic, but the message is large and clear: we need urgently to reform the system through which we process juveniles who commit crime, because the current system perpetuates the very injustices it was designed to address.

ANDREW SOLOMON

Allen, whose writing is creative and accessible, uses her finely tuned talent to fold Michael’s fate into the gathering storms of the U.S. criminal-justice system and Los Angeles’ gang-related and racial turmoil. Both a searching, personal elegy and a sure-footed lamentation of the systems meant to protect us, this is a searing must-read.

Annie Bostrom, Booklist

The genius of Cuz lies in its willingness to accept what isn’t known about Michael … Her memoir defies genre and expectation … Cuz is a literary miracle of form and content ... Allen’s ambitious breathtaking book challenges the moral composition of the world it inhabits by telling all who listen: I loved my cousin and he loved me, and I know he’d be alive if you loved him, too

Kiese Laymon, Washington Post Sunday

A compassionate retelling of an abjectly tragic story […] Among the most valuable contributions Allen makes is forcing us to ask: To what end are we locking up our children? Are we not foreclosing their options before their lives have even begun? […] Allen’s analysis of gang culture […] may be where she’s at her ferocious best

Jennifer Senior, New York Times

Powerful … A searing memoir and sharp social critique

Kirkus Review

At its heart, Allen’s book is both an outcry and entreaty as she grapples with a painful reality

Publishers Weekly

Allen’s exceptional professional accomplishments make her latest effort, a memoir about the soul-crushing murder of her beloved younger cousin Michael, all the more stirring ... a just and moving tribute to a family member she knew incompletely, but loved unfailingly ... As a memoirist, Allen is genuinely gifted.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Allen’s heartbreak gives way to a well-researched expedition. Why did this happen to a young black man from a loving family? Through memory, letters Michael wrote from prison and interviews with family members, Allen retraces his steps, filling in the parts of his life he kept hidden behind his grin ... Cuz is more than Michael’s story. It’s the story of ... a city where black and brown girls and boys engulfed by the crack epidemic and the rise of street gangs had no guardian angels ... In Cuz, Michael is the face of mass incarceration

San Francisco Chronicle

I can only stand in awe of Cuz’s account of her, Micheal’s and their family’s ordeals.

Huffington Post

[Cuz] will stay with you for a long time ... Moving, tender, angry, insightful, this is a damning incitement of how the system fails to treat people as humans, at how gang culture affects families, and a look at how love can blind people and have terrible consequences.

Stylist Magazine

Cuz will break your heart. Of the recent books that have done so much against such great odds to create a meaningful anti-incarceration movement in America, it may be the most compelling ... Danielle Allen brilliantly and searingly lays all of this out ...remarkable.

Jim Kaplan, The National Book Review

Allen makes way for letters Michael wrote from behind bars. You finally see Michael then. And, as Allen said, he is beautiful ... Michael is a virtuoso of a writer, and his brilliant letters chronicle his growth from boy to man in California’s penitentiary system.

Greg Howard, New York Times Book Review

I was left stunned by it. Required reading.

Sarah Shaffi, Monocle

Cuz is unbearably moving

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Guardian