“This is not a story without tragedy….But it is a story of redemption and breathtaking creativity, too,” writes Gifford, who...
The first biography of Robert Beck, aka Iceberg Slim, (1918-1992), builds a compelling case that the pimp-turned–popular author provided the foundation for gangsta rap, Blaxploitation movies, and so much of the underground culture that became mainstream.
Gifford (English/Univ. of Nevada; Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing, 2013) transcends the opacity of academic writing in this lively account of a subject he even admits “might at first glance seem like an appalling choice for a biography…he abused hundreds of women throughout his lifetime, and he is practically unknown to the American mainstream.” Yet his autobiography, Pimp, has sold millions of copies since its publication in 1967, though it was never reviewed in the literary press nor widely available in bookstores. Pimp and Slim’s subsequent novels and essay collections could be more commonly found in inner-city newsstands, taverns, and barbershops. Such seminal rappers as Ice Cube and Ice-T took their names to honor him, and Mike Tyson considered him a father figure. To Gifford, he’s an exemplar of the ambiguous complexity of the pimp in ghetto mythology, a flashy man who has been corrupted by a racist society and who has been able to triumph over white prejudice by exploiting black women who had too few options. The “Street Poison” of the title was the term favored by Slim to describe the insidious effects of ghetto life on an impressionable young man attracted to the worlds of sex, drugs, and glamour and who would deaden his soul to attain all of them. It shows complicated relationships with his mother and a series of father figures, accounts occasionally at odds with Slim’s own writing, and it shows how he transitioned from a life of crime to pulp literature.
“This is not a story without tragedy….But it is a story of redemption and breathtaking creativity, too,” writes Gifford, who not only tells the story well, but shows why it’s so significant.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53834-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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