Interweaving a variety of sociological concepts and historical examinations with intimate portraits of this singular family, Down the Up Staircase takes readers on an entertaining and provocative tour of twentieth-century urban America.
New Books in Sociology - Richard E. Ocejo
Every sociologist—indeed everyone—interested in race, mobility, and the African American experience should read this book. It will motivate rethinking of the stakes and consequences for African Americans striving to get or stay ahead. For sociologists and other scholars of race and the urban experience, as well as lay readers who desire to understand more fully much of what black family life in urban America was all about during the past 100 years, it should be a required text.
Sociological Forum - Alford A. Young
In this thoughtfully conceived and crafted memoir, the authors offer evocative, relentlessly honest portrayals without judgment. In doing so, they encourage the reader to ponder the variables in her own life, the tides and forces that help or hinder her pursuit of the sweet life.
The New York Times Book Review - Elizabeth Dowling Taylor
Down the Up Staircase is a beautifully written, captivating, and absorbing book that connects seemingly private concerns with public policies and structures in clear and convincing fashion. It delineates vividly how poverty and downward mobility do not make people noble, resilient, and resourceful, but instead shatter social ties and self-esteem. This fast-paced book will likely be consumed by readers in one sitting, but its powerful and poignant stories will linger in the mind long afterwards.
Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family , guides readers through the double glass doors of the Haynes family home as the tell the tale of Harlem's historical and social transformation using the family's crumbling three-story brownstone as the backdrop. Haynes and Solovitch pull back the proverbial curtains to document the tenuous nature of achievement, success, and status among the black middle class.
Like Harlem’s story, the memoir is bittersweet, painting a full and complicated picture of black upper-class life over generations.
In Down the Up Staircase: Three generations of a Harlem Family , Bruce D. Haynes (with his co-author, Syma Solovitch) gives us a poignant memoir of his own Uptown youth in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and also reaches further back to when his grandparents bought a townhouse in the Sugar Hill district in 1931.
Times Literary Supplement - Benjamin George Friedman
As Isabel Wilkerson did expertly in 'The Warmth of Other Suns' — the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic tale of the Great Migration — Haynes and Solovitch follow their relatives through decades, revealing the impact of public policy and social change on the family from generation to generation.
Washington Post - Krissah Thompson
Haynes and Solovitch weave memoir and sociology to document the shifting fortunes of the black middle-class family, and of Harlem itself, and illuminate the tenuous nature of status and success among the black middle class.
Haynes and Syma Solovitch show a surprisingly complex account of black middle class life in a biographically and analytically novel way. . . . Down the Up Staircase adds an important lens to the numerous complexities of generational social mobility for African Americans in the United States.
City & Community - Edwin Grimsley
Down The Up Staircase is more than a story of a family, far more than the chronology of a home. And yet the entire tale — the story of the black experience in the 20th century—feels like it’s being very intimately told to you from the parlor.
02/20/2017 This thoughtful and sobering memoir weaves the beauty and tragedy of Haynes’s family story into the complex history of Harlem. Haynes (Red Lines, Black Space) employs the book as a record, a way to secure the knowledge of his family’s contributions to African-American history. His grandfather, George Edmund Haynes, largely forgotten to history, was a scholar, researcher of the Great Migration, and cofounder of the National Urban League. His grandmother was noted children’s book author Elizabeth Ross Haynes. They resided in a resplendent home on Harlem’s posh Convent Avenue. Despite these bourgeois roots, the Hayneses’ fortunes rose and fell. Haynes lays bare their triumphs and blemishes. The relationship between his mother, Daisy Haynes, a respected program analyst, and father, George Haynes Jr., a parole officer, was replete with deception and infidelity. Over the marriage’s course, the two watched their Harlem home decay. Haynes found success, like his grandfather, as a scholar, but tragedy befell his two brothers: Alan was murdered, and George struggled with drug use and mental illness. Like Harlem’s story, the memoir is bittersweet, painting a full and complicated picture of black upper-class life over generations. (Apr.)
Bruce D. Haynes's story is a classic American tale—which combines the big themes of history with the gritty reality of a single family's extraordinary story.
This masterful account begins as a portrait of a house that was a living, breathing extension of the family that lived in it both in hopeful times and in darker ones. But it soon reaches out into the larger social landscape of Harlem and then into the changing history and culture of an entire land. In doing so, it shifts seamlessly from a sensitive biography to a thoughtful ethnographic sketch of an important place in an important time, and then into a wise and compelling essay on the social history of our time. What we encounter on the printed page, of course, is written narrative, but it is conveyed to us in what might best be described as a rich and perceptive voice. In every way, a remarkable work.
Haynes channels W. E. B. Du Bois to provide a rich sociological portrait of his "talented tenth" family. The lively writing conveys both universal family dramas of social mobility (up and down) as well as the particular context of Harlem across the twentieth century. A great read!
Down the Up Staircase is a riveting narrative about three generations of a black family and their struggle to maintain inherited privilege. Written with elegance and penetrating insight, the book shines light on the precarity that all blacks confront, regardless of their social class and personal ambitions.
[A] moving memoir.
East Bay Times - Georgia Rowe
Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family is at once a history of Black Harlem, Black social science in and beyond the academy, and the Black elite class. . . . In Haynes and Solovitch’s narrative hands, the book’s key characters – the three generations of the Haynes family, the Convent Avenue brownstone, and Harlem – do sweeping and personal historical work about race, class, and cities in twentieth century America.
Ethnic and Racial Studies - Zandria F. Robinson
Down the Up Staircase combines elements of memoir and sociology, culminating in an incredibly rich story.
Down the Up Staircase is a beautifully written, captivating, and absorbing book that connects seemingly private concerns with public policies and structures in clear and convincing fashion. It delineates vividly how poverty and downward mobility do not make people noble, resilient, and resourceful, but instead shatter social ties and self-esteem. This fast-paced book will likely be consumed by readers in one sitting, but its powerful and poignant stories will linger in the mind long afterwards.
★ 2017-01-23 A family's story reflects social upheaval.Combining memoir and astute cultural history, Haynes (Sociology/Univ. of California, Davis; Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb, 2001, etc.) and his wife and co-author, Solovitch, analyze the Haynes family as exemplary of African-American experiences throughout the 20th century. Haynes grew up in Harlem, privileged enough to attend elite private schools and Manhattanville College, which "seemed like a country club." After earning a doctorate in sociology, he taught at Yale, where he focused his research on race. Without strong religious or cultural ties to the African-American community, his research interest struck some as odd. "I became the black scholar who studies community while forever being in search of community," he admits. But Haynes had strong ancestral roots in sociology: his grandfather, the "first person of African descent to receive a doctorate from Columbia University," had been a noted social scientist, founder of the National Urban League, colleague of W.E.B. Du Bois, and adviser on race to President Woodrow Wilson; his grandmother was a social scientist as well; and Haynes' parents both were social workers. These intellectual and professional achievements did not prevent the family from suffering from the social blight, beginning in the 1970s, that changed Harlem from a thriving, proud neighborhood into a fearsome area rife with homelessness, drug wars, murder. One of his brothers was shot dead outside of the store where he worked; the other, whose bipolar illness was long misdiagnosed, succumbed to crack addiction. Along with sharp social analysis, Haynes chronicles his parents' bizarre relationship, which deteriorated precipitously when his mother found out that her husband had been married before. The once-elegant house in which the family lived crumbled into disrepair, concrete evidence of the state of his parents' marriage. The author's compassionate portraits of his brothers contrast with his unsentimental, even incredulous, view of his parents' personalities and choices, underscoring the impressive distance he has traveled in carving out his own successful life. A candid and profoundly personal contribution to America's racial history.