(11/17/2021): I enjoyed God's Bad Boy
immensely and learned a lot about our history, our people and about James Blake. The description of how he got his way in youth institutions and how administrators compromised with Blake parallels the "right guy" in the literature on prisons. He was the one who could not be broken and who had immense power. They had to negoiate with him.
Throughout the book were these wonderful one-sentence descriptions of settings that were lyrical and evocative and that crystalized the scenes in the mind of the reader. Dr. Bessie Blake was to James Blake what Alex Haley was to Malcolm X in the construction of his autobiography. An excellent job!
Dr. Arthur Lewin, Professor
Black and Hispanic Studies Department
Baruck College, City University of New York
(01/2014): ABC aired the riveting profile on Gil Noble’s Like It Is. Now, read the back story of James Blake’s journey from a childhood of family breakdown through a maze of foster and children’s homes. Along the way, he gained insights about social systems that fed into his life as an activist social worker and professor addressing the needs of at-risk youth in marginalized communities. In God’s Bad Boy, Dr. Bessie W. Blake pen’s an exhilarating biographical narrative of her husband that reveals the intimate struggles of a life where most everything is hard and all talents are worked to the maximum.
Leonard G. Dunson, President Emeritus,
National Association of Black Social Workers
