content: This book takes you from group homes to the mean streets of Harlem where Claude Brown tested fate and even some of societies taboos yet was able to pull himself up from the ghetto. He looks at child hood frineds that slipped through the cracks of society that became heroin addicts, pimps, players, pushers, and prostitutes. He shows exactly what life in the ghettos is all about the pain and the suffering. I've read this book three times and it gets better each time.