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How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture
Penguin Press
May 2010
On Sale: April 29, 2010
240 pages
ISBN: 159420263X
EAN: 9781594202636
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A pitch-perfect account of how hip-hop culture drew in the
author and how his father drew him out again-with love,
perseverance, and fifteen thousand books. Into Williams's childhood home-a one-story ranch house-his
father crammed more books than the local library could hold.
"Pappy" used some of these volumes to run an academic prep
service; the rest he used in his unending pursuit of wisdom.
His son's pursuits were quite different-"money, hoes, and
clothes." The teenage Williams wore Medusa- faced Versace
sunglasses and a hefty gold medallion, dumbed down and
thugged up his speech, and did whatever else he could to fit
into the intoxicating hip-hop culture that surrounded him.
Like all his friends, he knew exactly where he was the day
Biggie Smalls died, he could recite the lyrics to any Nas or
Tupac song, and he kept his woman in line, with force if
necessary. But Pappy, who grew up in the segregated South and hid in
closets so he could read Aesop and Plato, had a different
destiny in mind for his son. For years, Williams managed to
juggle two disparate lifestyles- "keeping it real" in his
friends' eyes and studying for the SATs under his father's
strict tutelage. As college approached and the stakes of the
thug lifestyle escalated, the revolving door between
Williams's street life and home life threatened to spin out
of control. Ultimately, Williams would have to decide
between hip-hop and his future. Would he choose "street
dreams" or a radically different dream- the one Martin
Luther King spoke of or the one Pappy held out to him now? Williams is the first of his generation to measure the
seductive power of hip-hop against its restrictive
worldview, which ultimately leaves those who live it
powerless. Losing My Cool portrays the allure and the danger
of hip-hop culture like no book has before. Even more
remarkably, Williams evokes the subtle salvation that
literature offers and recounts with breathtaking clarity a
burgeoning bond between father and son.
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