Customer Reviews

Iceberg Slim: The Life as Art

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I didn't think I'd like this book when I first heard about it, but a reliable friend told me to read it, and I did, and I'm very glad I did. It's the story of the life and writings of Robert Beck (1918-1992), an African American man of exceptional intellectual gifts who wrote and lived and even thrived for many years in a Chicago ghetto as"Iceberg Slim," a sometimes pimp, sometimes convict, and who came of political and moral age during the civil rights movement. He might easily be considered the father of "street lit" or "hip-hop lit" or any of the half dozen other names used these days to describe the raw, roughly told, best-selling novels of extreme urban survival in the modern American ghetto.

I should say that author Muckley does not characterize Slim as a writer of street lit; the characterization is mine, but it fits. To be fair, the genre was still more than 30 years away from BEING a genre back when Slim began publishing-and selling-millions of books, but to me that's all the more reason to give this book a serious look. I think as street lit grows in influence (and it's growing), Slim's importance will be realized, and Muckley's book will be at the top of everybody's short list. It just reads that way. It illuminates the graphic literary artistry of Iceberg Slim in a way that invites exploration. What you thought you would put you off, the tales of violence, racism, sexism, poverty of ghetto life-while real, and really disturbing-become, through Muckley's book, the swirling backdrop for an extraordinary story of transcendence of ALL of it through deeply engaged writing.

Using plot outlines, biographical vignettes, photos, rock-solid scholarship, a deep affinity for and understanding of his subject, and consistently assured and lively writing (in addition, evidently, to calling on his own years living in slums), Muckley takes you into the deep ghetto of late 20th century America and lets you feel a little of what it's like live there, day to day, grow up there, look down the road at living there until you die, under the conditions that millions still do, today, in the 21st century, in the wealthiest nation on earth. And in methodical fashion, looking at Slim's work book by book, essay by essay, and weaving biography as he goes, Muckley carries you through the world of Iceberg Slim manifest by Slim himself and his family and fellow travelers, and by his vibrant, vital, struggling fictional characters, who work through his real-life challenges in their fictionalized lives.

Muckley shows the evolution and merging of the writer and his art in many telling and dramatic vignettes. Particularly memorable for me was how Robert Beck came to become Iceberg Slim, which occurred in real life in the natural course of an informal ghetto naming "ceremony," which Muckley contextualizes, in the telling, in a way that humanizes Slim and all of the people who move through this sometimes inhuman world.

There are 2 things to be prepared for: (1) Though the writing quality is uniformly sparkling, first rate, the typesetting is less good, which might annoy the persnickety reader (like me). The flaws are minor, not overnumerous, and they never interfere with meaning, but don't be put off when you see them (actually, as I moved through it, I found that they actually added to the "street lit" feel of the thing). (2) The book is very opinionated politically, and I found myself disagreeing with some of its leftist positions, even though I consider myself left of center. However, the vitality of expression informed by these stong politics served more to invigorate for me rather than distract because it's the story of an extremely intelligent man who became very political as he matured and used subversive politics as very moral survival means in his almost incomprehensibly harsh world.

I highly recommend this book. It gives you a glimpse of an American life that most of us, if we're lucky, will never see, and it traces the life and work of an exceptional man who not only survived it, but managed to turn the intensity of it into art. It's an extraordinary book.

It's always hard to read something about your favourite writer: you know that hype is bound to be everywhere, that the critic or even enthusiast is gonna get it all wrong about Slim, about YOUR Slim.

It comes as a welcome surprise then to read Pete Muckley's Iceberg Slim: The Life As Art. Though the dude is an academic, he's got the feel for Slim. The best thing about the book, for me, was the breakdown of chapters and the list of characters at the end. Every Slim-fan will appreciate these features and they'll never be dated. You can always go back to them to soup up your gen on the Great man and his works.

Apart from that, the book is very WELL-WRITTEN, the cat's got rhythm even if he ain't on the streets no more. I recommend Iceberg Slim: The Life As Art, and, man, with no reservations.
Buy it.

I am a Slim fan. I had my doubts about reading anything at all worthwhile on Slim, having read so much silliness. Iceberg Slim: The Life As Art is anything but silly. It is a well-researched Lit. Crit. approach to the entire works; a thing, I think never done before.

It nicely mixes the Life with the Art and shows why Slim should be in the ranks of the GREAT African American tradition. The observations are always deep, even if you do not agree with them all.

I call it "re-readable" because it contains certain things which any student (or Fan) will always go back to. I am thinking of the photos, of course, but also the indispensable List of Players at the end, the Works Cited and the fascinating "Parallel Chronology" of the beginning.

I hope Muckley, who seems to have written other works on African American Literature, will keep up the good work. This book is readable and re-readable, I'll say it again.

I wasn't too sure what to expect from this book to be honest, but essentially it's a critical study of the works of Iceberg Slim. I bought it hoping for some biographical insight, so I was quite disappointed from that standpoint as there is very little aside from some pictures in the back. The claim on the back that Muckley is "Slim's unofficial biographer" therefore seems kind of redundant, seeing as no such biographically focussed work seems to exist, or at least certainatly doesn't in these pages. Thing is, this isn't a book about the man Iceberg Slim, it's an academic study of his work, and reading through it it does help build up a picture of the recurring themes and characters in Iceberg's life. I was disappointed not to find more on Pimp and Naked Soul, but having not read his other books, it was interesting to get an idea of what they're about and how they tie in with the aformentioned two. Only negative thing I will say about it though, is that I think Peter Muckley loses his cool a little at some points, and sometimes tends to use the book to attack academics, rather than stick to the task at hand which can get tiresome in places. Don't get me wrong, Slim was a great author, and definately deserves to have his work looked at more seriously, but Muckley hammers this point home a little too often for my liking which can take away from an otherwise interesting study of Slim's work.
For what it is, it's very thorough, but to me this isn't the definitive study of Slim's work, but hopefully it will be the beginning of more academics examining his work in a closer light. Highly recommended for students writing of Slim's work, or even just students of American fiction in general, and an intersting read nonetheless.