Little Boy Blues

For Malcolm Jones, his parents’ disintegrating marriage was at the center of life in North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s. His father, charming but careless, was often drunk and away from home; his mother, a schoolteacher and faded Southern belle, clung to the past and hungered for respectability. In Little Boy Lost , Jones—one of our most admired cultural observers—recalls a childhood in which this relationship played out against the larger cracks of society: the convulsions of desegregation and