Impossible Man (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781593762261)

Recognized by readers of his novel, The Taqwacores, as the godfather of American Muslim punk, Michael Muhammad Knight is a voice for the growing number of teenagers who choose neither side of the "Clash of Civilizations." Knight has now written his personal story, a chronicle of his bizarre and traumatic boyhood and his conversion to Islam during a turbulent adolescence.

Impossible Man follows a boy's struggle in coming to terms with his father--a paranoid schizophrenic and white supremacist who had threatened to decapitate Michael when he was a baby--and his father's place in his own identity. It is also the story of a teenager's troubled path to maturity and the influences that steady him along the way. Knight's encounter with Malcolm X's autobiography transforms him from a disturbed teenager engaged in correspondence with Charles Manson to a zealous Muslim convert who travels to Pakistan and studies in a madrassa. Later disillusioned by radical religion, he again faces the crisis of self-definition.

For all its extremes, Impossible Man describes a universal journey: a wounded boy in search of a working model of manhood, going to outrageous lengths to find it.

Author: Michael Muhammad Knight
ISBN-10: 1593762267
ISBN-13: 9781593762261
Publisher: Catapult
Language: English
Published: 04/01/2009
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.24h x 5.48w x 0.94d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/09/2009 pg. 41
Vanity Fair 04/01/2009 pg. 64
Library Journal 05/01/2014 pg. 38