(pb; 2017: memoir)
From
the inside flap
“As he
stumbled through high school, struggling to find a community among other fans
of punk rock music, Christian Picciolini was recruited by a now notorious
white-power skinhead leader and encouraged to fight with the movement to ‘protect
the white race from extinction.’ Soon, he had become an expert in racial
philosophies, a terror who roamed the neighborhood, quick to throw fists. When
his mentor was arrested and sentenced to eleven years in prison,
sixteen-year-old Picciolini took over the man’s role as the leader of an
infamous neo-Nazi skinhead group.
“Seduced
by the power he accrued through intimidation, andswept up in the rhetoric he
had adopted, Picciolini worked to grow an army of extremists. He used music as
a recruitment tool, launching his own propaganda band that performed at
white-power rallies around the world. But slowly, as he started a family of his
own and a job that for the first time brought him face to face with people of
walks of life, he began to recognize the cracks in his hateful ideology. Then a
shocking loss at the hands of racial violence changed his life. . . and Picciolini
realized too late the full extent of the harm he’d caused.”
Review
Picciolini’s
chronicled journey from lonely boy to violent racialist leader to reformed,
mature man is engaging, tight and hard to set down─even at its darkest, White is a humane, timely and gripping
take on the point of view of a (former) white-power agitator, who escaped his
almost-certain destruction before it almost engulfed him. This is an excellent memoir,
one of my favorite books read this year.
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