Mitchell S. Jackson’s startling and inventive Survival Math ... is technically a memoir, [but] such a designation feels too narrow to encompass the bracing people’s history it delivers ... Moving back and forth through time, combining interviews of his subjects with first-person accounts from his own memory, Jackson’s book achieves the goal of taxonomizing the environment he grew up in ... By placing his own story within a longer historical lineage, Jackson has gone to great effort crafting a universal black narrative ... What differentiates Survival Math from that most common and banal of black narratives—the perseverance chronicle—is that Jackson doesn’t present himself as apart. He’s a willing-but-reluctant participant rather than a victim ... perhaps the most compelling cadre of voices may be the 'Survivor Files' ... Jackson situates these accounts in second-person, the you’s accumulating, then refracting in exhilarating and inquisitive ways. The form reads as a call for eradicating barriers, and asks for a degree of empathy rarely experienced, one that encompasses an entire humanity—flaws and all.
... vibrant ... Jackson recognizes there is too much for one conventional form, and his various storytelling methods imbue the book with an unpredictable dexterity. It is sharp and unshrinking in depictions of his life, his relatives (blood kin and otherwise), and his Pacific Northwest hometown, which serves as both inescapable character and villain ... One device Jackson uses to great effect are what he calls 'survivor files,' interviews with men in his family detailing their experiences with gangs, infidelity, and incarceration ... [Jackson's] virtuosic wail of a book reminds us that for a black person in America, it can never be that easy.
Jackson’s work is a model of autobiographical writing that demonstrates how reportage and critical attention to the complexities of black life — its intersectional textures — can be the source material for an inimitable memoir ... Throughout Survival Math, Jackson writes with a keen attentiveness to the social contexts shaping the lives of his family, offering nuanced depictions that upend the stereotypes that often cage us in ... Jackson, like his contemporary Kiese Laymon, author of the recent memoir Heavy, has produced a work that faces this task head on ... Survival Math makes it clear that blackness is never a deficit. And yet as Jackson reminds us, even those of us who are black men must be certain not to rely on a computational system, steeped in anti-black racist patriarchy, to save ourselves while harming others.
The biggest challenge in describing Mitchell S. Jackson's Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family is whether to be appropriately effusive and risk seeming like I'm in his pay — or to be more tempered and risk underselling the brilliance of this memoir in essays ... One of the book's many treasures is Jackson's attentiveness to providing historical context for the forces shaping his family members and the place they call home. These forays into history are as wide-ranging as they are engaging ... Jackson's searing intelligence is on full display throughout the work, but it is particularly notable when he takes on the problems of gentrification, white supremacy and corporations that gain their wealth off the bodies of the poor. Equally striking is the author's unflinching commitment to turn his critical eye inward ... From searching for a kidnapped daughter to a repeatedly delayed prison release to facing eviction as a teenager, these pieces are as moving as they are powerful.
The [book's] detours recall the hectic narrative nonfiction of the ’90s and early aughts, by writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace. I’d forgotten how much I didn’t miss it ... The elaborate architecture of the book can feel like an exercise in misdirection, especially when Jackson turns to his treatment of women ... These stories shimmer with pain. But Jackson doesn’t linger on them ... Too often, a strong protective instinct takes over [in Jackson's writing] ... This [passage from the book] is stale writing — period, exclamation point. It is beneath Jackson... it misses the pungency and wisdom of the scenes, the richness and beautiful uncertainties of the voice he inhabits, when he seeks to depict and not merely sermonize ... I will never forget [Jackson's encounter with his mother]. What a book this might have been had he stayed in this register a little longer, had he stayed with all that is “frightening and exhilarating,” and let us truly encounter him.
Product-of-my-environment stories are common; beyond his candid self-portrayal as a willing-but-reluctant participant, what makes Jackson’s take on this theme so compelling is his inquisitive and unflinching investigation of the conditions that shaped him.
... powerful ... a vulnerable, sobering look at Jackson’s life and beyond, with all its tragedies, burdens and faults ... [Jackson's] explorations feel strikingly unguarded.
Jackson is a distracted essayist of occasionally overwrought prose, pulling many characters into his musings on drug addiction, pimping, the history of white supremacy in Oregon and the effects of trauma ... Jackson’s work often juxtaposes the tenets of history or philosophy against the grim reality of his own life; in this dichotomy, he exposes the reality of a rigged system. Each essay is a cornucopia of semi-related ideas, yet Survival Math is remarkably direct and poignant when the author focuses on the intimacies of his own deepest betrayals and hopes.
In Mitchell S. Jackson's new book, nearly every word hurts ... [The writing] is dense and rich, alternately blunt and tender, with references that run the gamut from Snoop Dogg to Adam Smith. The content, though, isn't for the faint of heart ... Jackson writes about [the brutal events in the text] with shocking candor ... And it's not just the personal details that sting ... It's often painful to read, but Jackson weaves these stories together with fluid grace ... what Jackson has created is a monument to the marginalized—and it's every bit as harrowing and beautiful as its architect's life.
A dynamic, impressive debut memoir ... The narrative hits its peak when Jackson motions beyond the tenuous spectacle of a moment to understand what came before it and to hope about what deliverance might come after it even while admitting, sometimes ashamedly so, that he is still wrestling with it all. A potent book that revels in the author’s truthful experiences while maintaining the jagged-grain, keeping-it-a-100, natural storytelling that made The Residue Years a modern must-read.
The prose is a stunning mix of second-person observations of various unnamed males in his family and historical and religious references that he incorporates to tell his story ... Thanks to Jackson’s fresh voice, this powerful autobiography shines an important light on the generational problems of America’s oft-forgotten urban communities.
