A familiar story to fans of The Wire, but Watkins provides a gritty, vivid first-person document of a desperate demographic.
A memoir of growing up and selling drugs on East Baltimore’s bloody corners.
Watkins follows up his acclaimed The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America (2015) with a personalized account of the lure of the gangster life for many inner-city black Americans, as well as the grim circumstances propelling them into it. The author opens with his beloved brother’s senseless murder (“selling drugs seemed legal where you lived and he taught you how to be extra careful because bodies dropped every day”) and chronicles how, devastated, he used an inheritance of drugs and money to enter “the game” himself. This occurred with incongruous ease, as his new crew retook an old drug corner. “Street fortunes were made and lost there,” he writes. “My Uncle Gee had it for the longest.” With canny promotion and good-quality product, Watkins established himself as a prominent, low-key dealer: “I could stack a few hundred grand without shooting anyone while I figured my life out, met some girls, and had some fun.” Things proceeded smoothly, despite occasional violent incursions and Watkins’ awareness that his operation, though discreet, fueled the community’s most destructive aspects even while contributing economically to it. He ultimately extricated himself and entered college as his erstwhile colleagues paid the costs of addiction and felony charges. The author’s writing projects keen awareness of both the mediated image of the young black dealer and the actual grim life prospects for a generation of his inner-city peers. His memoir’s strengths include its bleakly humorous, original prose, which pinballs between stoned, brand-focused, hip-hop excess and a more contemplative tone, and the many true, touching, or disturbing small details from the fraught daily lives of America’s black underclass. However, many narrative threads trail off unresolved, beginning with his brother’s murder, which fuels the story yet is left unaddressed.
A familiar story to fans of The Wire, but Watkins provides a gritty, vivid first-person document of a desperate demographic.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-8863-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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