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DIGGING FOR DIRT

Name: DIGGING FOR DIRT
Author: Jaime Lowe
ISBN: 978-0-86547-969-2

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ODB

by Jaime Lowe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 2008

Rousing and well-informed, though a bit too impressed with itself.

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The late firecracker MC gets his due in a worshipful eulogy.

For a time in the early ’90s, that loose collective of kung-fu–inspired rappers known as the Wu-Tang Clan was pretty much the best thing going in hip-hop, and the most dynamic member of the clan was Russell Jones, aka Ol’ Dirty Bastard, aka Dirt McGirt. In writing the story of ODB’s chaotic life and career, freelance journalist Lowe initially overdoes it, showing herself to be too ardent a fan. A self-described “middle-class Jew who grew up on Madonna and musical theater in West L.A.,” she writes that her interest in ODB’s morphing persona and verbal dexterities “started as a curiosity and as social currency” but later turned into a full-bore obsession. The narrative does a decent job covering ODB’s childhood in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and his early ascension as part of the Wu-Tang Clan’s revolutionary attack on the music world. Then it becomes as messy as ODB’s life when he spun out of control later in the ’90s, with overlapping story lines about his mental illnesses, addictions and jail time, all spiraling down to his too-early but sadly predictable death from heart failure (later ruled the result of an accidental drug overdose). Although Lowe displays an exemplary knowledge of hip-hop and ODB’s place within it, she also blows her own profile as a fan out of proportion so that, perversely, her subject shades into the background. At times, the middle-class author gets in over her head, as when she criticizes pop-rappers like Will Smith for being “so seriously deaf to street semantics.” However, Lowe’s strong and quite welcome vein of generosity toward her subject is winning in the end, particularly in describing the tragedy of a life that collapsed so spectacularly and so publicly, with few of his fans and enablers doing anything to stop it.

Rousing and well-informed, though a bit too impressed with itself.

Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-86547-969-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
BREATHING FIRE
by Jaime Lowe

- BOOK REVIEW
MENTAL
by Jaime Lowe

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)