Darnell Moore was in on BLM on the ground floor, helping to organize the protests in Ferguson that really kickstarted the organization. Now he has a memoir and it’s worth reminding everyone before I get into things that I really don’t like the memoir as a genre. This book follows a pretty standard path for these kinds of books, starting with Moore’s childhood and youth in Camden, New Jersey, moving through his college years, crippling health problems, struggling with his sexuality & his faith, becoming a writer and politically active. Probably the most interesting section to me was the section that dealt with his time as a youth pastor, a real firebrand but also closeted, wrestling with the guilt of gay sexual encounters while trying to function as the ideal Respectable Christian Young Black Man. This wasn’t particularly well written; memoirs often tread the same ground as other memoirs, so it’s often down to the quality of the prose when it comes to which ones rise and which ones fall in my opinion. Moore unfortunately falls; it’s not terrible prose, just bland and kind of flat. But I do have to direct some criticism at Moore’s editors. I read a first edition and there have been others since, so hopefully these things have been fixed, but I was startled at just how many mistakes there were in the book. Sometimes it was the wrong word used, the old “their/there” kind of thing, mistakes a spell-checker wouldn’t catch. Other times it was just words misspelled. That can happen to anybody and it’s not really Moore’s fault. It's the fault of his publisher and his editors. And it’s too bad, but that kind of thing does impact my enjoyment of a book; for one thing, it just feels like the people publishing the book didn’t really care enough about it to be, well, careful. Anyway, I’m assuming all that is fixed in later editions; it had better be or Moore should seek publication elsewhere. Anyway, all in all, a pretty standard issue memoir with standard issue writing. 2 stars.
tl;dr – Moore has some interesting stories, but the prose is flat and bland; also, not Moore’s fault, but the editors let a lot of mistakes slip through. 2 stars.