A boldly opinionated, bracingly street-tough memoir.
Once-controversial rapper turned actor’s no-nonsense overview of his life.
Although Ice-T (The Ice Opinion, 1994), born Tracy Marrow, spent his early childhood in quaint Summit, N.J., by his early teens both his parents were dead, and he was living with his aunt in the gangbanger-ruled streets of South Central Los Angeles. Attending infamous Crenshaw High School, he flirted with gang affiliation and criminal activities. While still a teen, he had his own house and lived off social security and the occasional illicit street hustle. Then he joined the Army and trained as a paratrooper. It’s in his post-Army years that the author’s autobiographical confessions start to really heat up. He orchestrated a series of department-store heists around L.A. and beyond, and his adrenaline-rush descriptions of these robberies show what competent criminals could achieve before the advent of sophisticated detection devices. Yet after a few close shaves with the law, he gave up crime to rap about it. Ice asserted himself as the first rapper to talk about street crime using explicit language. By the late ’80s, he was signed to Sire Records and selling hundred of thousands of albums despite little radio airplay. Not long after he established himself in the rap game, he landed substantial acting roles in feature films like Colors and New Jack City. The latter half of the book covers, among other topics, the controversy surrounding the inflammatory Body Count song, “Cop Killer,” his love life, and his thoughts on being an actor (he now stars in Law & Order: SVU). The author is surprisingly self-conscious about criticism directed at him, complaining a lot about “haters,” even though he can be a pretty harsh critic himself. Mostly he uses this book as a sounding board for his no-holds-barred opinions of contemporary hip hop (it’s weak) and culture in general, the cutthroat Hollywood system (where the real gangsters are), money and fame (overrated) and his role as a parent and husband (he’s tough but fair).
A boldly opinionated, bracingly street-tough memoir.Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-52328-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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