Not without flaws but an insightful firsthand account of hip-hop’s vanguard.
Reflections on a life of artistic commitment during hip-hop’s golden age.
“I wasn’t trying to become a rapper, I just enjoyed doing it,” writes Rakim in his debut memoir. From his first exposure to hip-hop as a boy to being universally recognized as a contender for the greatest MC of all time, Rakim makes his love of rap manifest throughout the book. Whether rapping “from 10 in the morning to midnight, every day,” or refusing to change his style to meet the approval of Marley Marl or Dr. Dre, he presents himself as deeply committed to the art of rap. His experience crafting lyrics transfers nicely to prose; the narrative is reflective in the way of good memoir and revelatory in the way of good reportage. The scenes from Rakim’s childhood are especially vivid and establish him early on as the smart and fiercely independent person his fans would come to know through his music. One consequence of that independence has been the number of people he has been at odds with over the course of his career. Ever the competitor, Rakim uses the book as a chance to settle scores with seemingly every rapper of his era other than Tupac, for whom he has only respect. About his longtime collaborator Eric B., he writes, “I’m really hip-hop and Eric really wasn’t….I think deep down, Eric wanted to be an R&B singer.” The book wavers when the author turns didactic or lets sections of lyrics and commentary interrupt the narrative. Readers gain so much from Rakim’s story and his insights into artistry that the moments of didacticism—e.g., “if it’s your first tour, be prepared for the unique variety of challenges that come with being a rap artist”—become grating. The author’s lyrics, as groundbreaking as they were, don’t read as well as they sound in Rakim’s voice, nor do they add to what the book otherwise does so well: tell the personal story of one of hip-hop’s greatest icons.
Not without flaws but an insightful firsthand account of hip-hop’s vanguard.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285023-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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