Publishers Weekly
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Journalist and novelist Jasper (Dark) shares insightful, though often tedious moral lessons on black man hood. With the recent death of his 83-year-old grandfather, Jesse James Langley Sr., Jasper delves into his forebear's difficult, angry journey in America. Orphaned early in rural Greenville, N.C., Jesse left home, finding work at the Pentagon, where he met and married Sally Helen Smith. They moved to Childress Street, in a Washington, D.C., suburb, and for the next 60 years Jesse proved a steady provider, if embittered by the scarring of racism and an inability to express emotion. His stoic example wasn't duplicated in the next generations, throughout eras transformed by the historic movements of Civil Rights, Black Power and feminism, as well as by drugs decimating black neighborhoods. In erratic chapters, Jasper presents histories of significant family members, including his mother, Angela, an emancipated working woman, divorced over conflicting roles of husband and wife; Uncle Gary and his purposeless life chained to heroin; and success story Latanya Langley, a cousin raised in Norwalk, Conn., so educated and privileged she was considered a "bourgie," or someone who wanted to be white. Jasper asks some tough questions of the black community in his search to understand his own identity. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (Jan. 10) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Jasper's maternal grandfather, Jesse Langley Sr., mostly sat apart from the family at holiday gatherings, maintaining his distance though he was loved and revered. Jesse's 60 years of marriage to Sally wasn't always so distant. Kenji sets out to discover how the Lone Ranger, who died in 2002, came to prefer the distance even as he remained in the family house in Washington, D.C. In his probing, Kenji speaks to family, friends, and acquaintances to piece together a portrait of a man who survived harsh conditions and limitations imposed by racism to provide for his family in the bosom of a close-knit community. Kenji contrasts the struggles of his parents' generation and their divorce versus the grandparents' stoic marriage. In the process, Kenji learns as much about himself and the plight of black men in general as he does about his grandfather. Novelist Jasper offers a poignant look at love and family complexity. --Vanessa Bush Copyright 2006 Booklist

Library Journal
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In this narrative about family, grief, and love, novelist/NPR commentator Jasper (Dark) sheds light on the African American experience through oral histories as he explores his grandfather's life as the lone ranger—a man who set himself apart from his family yet had a powerful influence on his grandson. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Novelist Jasper explores the roots and psyche of an African-American family. As he approached his 30th year, the author (Seeking Salamanca Mitchell, 2004, etc.) had his view of fatherhood irrevocably challenged when his girlfriend became pregnant. He turned to his family's difficult patriarch, octogenarian Jesse Langley Sr., for insights. What made Granddaddy Jesse so emotionally diffident and cold, despite the fact that he was an adequate husband, father and grandfather for 60 years? Jasper's grandfather died before Jasper could visit Greenville, N.C., the place where Jesse grew up, lost his parents and gave himself the name the Lone Ranger. The author was left to pry answers from his immediate family. Grandma Sally recalled meeting Jesse, when she was 19, in the Pentagon lunchroom; it was 1940, and they had both moved out of the South to find work in D.C. For all of their married life they lived on Childress Street in the capital. Jasper's mother Angela, firstborn of three children, held up the example of her father as a responsible provider to her own husband, Melvin, who eventually caved under the pressure and left. (Ironically, Melvin later started another family and stuck with it.) Jasper visited innumerable aunts, uncles and cousins, extracting their stories of survival throughout the tumultuous political decades from the civil-rights movement through the sexual revolution and into the present. He found that few of Jesse's descendants wanted to talk about the emotional toll that being orphaned and black took on him. In colloquial, heavy-handed prose, Jasper veers capriciously from personal history into muddled family chronology, offering plenty of moral slogans and relationship lessons for his contemporaries. Earnest, often heartbreaking, but somehow still unsatisfying. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.