What People are Saying About This
Dan Fesperman
No writer knows this territory better than Rafael Alvarez, and he tell's Bruce White's harrowing story with a fresh, urgent candor; a deep exploration of a wayward soul who somehow found his way to redemption.
Bruce Craven
Bruce White was raised with opportunities, comfort and resources in Baltimore. Like many boys and girls in the rebellious Sixties and Seventies, White and his friends watch their older brothers party. They want to get high, too, and they do. But for Bruce White, sexual abuse, brutal insecurity and a hunger to gain status with his peers feeds the relentless choice to keep upping the drug load. Cranking and sedating himself becomes his purpose. The superficial idyll of his boyhood morphs fast into violent criminal adult behavior with horrible costs. White understands his strength is that he just doesn't care and will confront anything on the streets or in the jail-yard to get what he needs. Then, in middle age, what he needs changes. Rafael Alvarez writes: "Dope no longer provided escape from the skin in which he'd been born." Bruce White has been wounded by SWAT bullets and prison razors, but on his journey, as captured by Alvarez, we watch him step from the haze of the addicted and search for his true life.
Scott Shane
For those struggling with addiction—and for their loved ones—the story of Bruce White should bring terror, because it shows just how far a person can fall, and hope, because he came back. Rafael Alvarez gives us a relentlessly honest look at the disease that is ravaging so many American communities.
Domenick Lombardozzi
From the first time I met Rafael on The Wire, we've always had in depth conversations. Whether about our families or work, it always left me smiling. Like his anthology Hometown Boy, where Alvarez recounts stories of those who call Baltimore home, Don't Count Me Out, is filled with affliction and triumph. The Bruce White Story takes you along the road to redemption.
Colin Asher
Don't Count Me Out is the product of the ideal pairing of author and subject. Rafael Alvarez is a veteran scribe with a sympathetic ear, a keen eye for expository detail, and a veteran reporter's faith in the power of verifiable fact. Bruce White is a man whose life has been so full of violence, duplicity, and drama that, in the hands of another writer, his story might read like an outlandish bit of urban myth. Both are hometown boys—Baltimore through and through—and the alchemy created by the combination of their contrasting histories and common geography has produced a text of concise power and laudable empathy.
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