- Home
- biography & autobiography
- religion
- Hard Knocks
Hard Knocks
Memoir of a Small Moment
by Ray Lopez
Foreword by Paula Gill Lopez
Imprint: Resource Publications
Hard Knocks: Memoir of a Small Moment is the story of one man's dynamic journey through life from birth until the day after his twenty-first birthday. It takes place during the 1960s and 1970s on Long Island in New York. From a Latino background, he takes us through his cultural confusion, as his parents tried to assimilate within a predominantly white community, and his confrontation with overt racism at school. It details the abusive environment he faced in Catholic school, his growing anger, and his fall into childhood alcoholism and delinquency. The Vietnam War, counterculture, and science provide a constant background for his growing awareness, choices, decisions, and delusions about the world and his own life. His alcoholism merges with drug addiction and he finds value and identity within a gang. The momentum of his life, balancing precariously between rebellious destruction and a search for artistic beauty and truth, takes the reader through the criminal justice and mental health systems, where the narrator awakens to the truth of Christ in his life.
Ray Lopez works as a mitigation specialist in capital cases after retiring from a twenty-six-year career as a federal probation officer. Born in Brooklyn in 1959 and raised on Long Island during the 1960s and 1970s, he journeyed through racism, Catholicism, counterculture, alcoholism, drug addiction, hospitalization, and jail to find hope in Christ. He earned his master’s degree from UC Berkeley in English in 1988 and has only recently returned to creative writing.
“Ray Lopez’s Hard Knocks is a stunning memoir of the seemingly inevitable destruction of a confused young man. . . . On the surface he appears to be just another casualty of addiction, but dig deeper and you’ll find another narrative, one of faith and redemption.”
—James Brown, author of Apology to the Young Addict and The Los Angeles Diaries
“Lopez writes in a sophisticated but vivid, plain style that calls attention to what’s going on in the world in which the author confronts hard knocks and gives some too. . . . Hard Knocks is a book of many pleasures. It is an affirmation of one’s life and one’s heritage.”
—Donald W. Markos, author of Ideas in Things: The Poems of William Carlos Williams
“Hard Knocks is a relevant story for today. Seeds of hate were sown in Ray’s young heart as he tried to navigate through a climate of racism and hate. Hard Knocks fully reveals the inner rage that took Ray to the precipice of self-destruction—prison and hospitalization. How does a man filled with rage, hate, and revenge become a man filled with love, especially for those caught in the same struggle?”
—Vinny Carbone, teacher, Fairfield, Connecticut
Related Titles
