{"product_id":"barless-anthony-aleman-9798997177904","title":"Barless: A Bronx Memoir","description":"\u003cp\u003eBARLESS: A Bronx Memoir\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA raw, unsparing memoir of hunger, abandonment, and improvised family - told entirely in the voice of the boy who lived it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnthony Aleman was eleven, alone for days at a stretch on the fourteenth floor of a South Bronx tower, when he learned to stage his own apartment for the social worker: shovel out the dog waste, swallow toothpaste so his breath was clean, line the cabinets with cans no one was allowed to open. He was protecting his mother - a woman who had loved him once, and who was disappearing inch by inch behind a man, a drug, and a thing the boy could only name the Rot.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBARLESS is the account of the years that followed, written without hindsight and without mercy. In the flat present tense of a child who was never taught what he was supposed to feel, Aleman records a body burned in a stairwell, a father he meets just in time to watch him die, a high school with metal detectors and razor blades, foster placements and group homes, and a mother who walks past him on the street for three years without ever looking up.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd on a stoop across from the tower that erased him: a family that owed him nothing, teaching him to fight, to dance, to be Puerto Rican, to be loved.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom the crack-war Bronx to a hundred acres of Florida green to a convent in Syracuse, this is not a story about being saved. It is the record of a boy building a self out of whatever the street handed him.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe spent that childhood on a fourteenth-story windowsill with no bars on it. Nothing holding him in. Nobody there to catch him. He would escape one place after another before learning that a cage doesn't need bars.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat does a child become when nobody ever comes?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Anthony Aleman\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9798997177904\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Barless Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 07\/30\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 302\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.66lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.00h x 5.00w x 0.68d","brand":"Anthony Aleman","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":49002383540479,"sku":"9798997177904","price":19.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/barless-anthony-aleman-9798997177904","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}