Buck: A Memoir Hardcover – August 20, 2013

*Starred Review* In this bruising memoir, author, filmmaker, and professor Asante recalls his troubled youth in Philadelphia, or, as he calls it, “Killadelphia, Pistolvania.” The story begins with Asante’s older brother, Uzi, being placed under arrest. Asante, nicknamed Malo and all of 12 at the time, looks up to Uzi, even as (especially as) he sees him carted away by the police. Uzi is more than a big brother, he says, “he’s my idol.” Malo is on the same path as Uzi. Worse, his father is absent and his mother has health issues. He hates the schools he attends where, invariably, he is told that his personality and attitude are “unacceptable.” As a last resort, he enrolls at an alternative school that is “perched on a hill and looks like a gingerbread house.” His classmates are misfits and outcasts with purple Mohawks, some wearing trench coats and ponytails, “looking like Columbine shooters.” And yet, it is here that he learns how to express himself in writing, and that changes his life. Interspersed with hip-hop lyrics by the likes of Tupac Shakur and Public Enemy, this is an inspiring story about perseverance and finding purpose that is sure to appeal to readers interested in hip-hop, black studies, and American pop culture in general. --June Sawyers

“A story of surviving and thriving with passion, compassion, wit, and style.”—Maya Angelou 
 
“In America, we have a tradition of black writers whose autobiographies and memoirs come to define an era. . . . Buck may be this generation’s story.”—NPR

“The voice of a new generation. . . . You will love nearly everything about Buck.”—Essence

“A virtuoso performance . . . [an] extraordinary page-turner of a memoir . . . written in a breathless, driving hip-hop prose style that gives it a tough, contemporary edge.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Frequently brilliant and always engaging . . . It takes great skill to render the wide variety of characters, male and female, young and old, that populate a memoir like Buck. Asante [is] at his best when he sets out into the city of Philadelphia itself. In fact, that city is the true star of this book. Philly’s skateboarders, its street-corner philosophers and its tattoo artists are all brought vividly to life here. . . . Asante’s memoir will find an eager readership, especially among young people searching in books for the kind of understanding and meaning that eludes them in their real-life relationships. . . . A powerful and captivating book.”—Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

“Remarkable . . . Asante’s prose is a fluid blend of vernacular swagger and tender poeticism. . . . [He] soaks up James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Walt Whitman like thirsty ground in a heavy rain. Buck grew from that, and it’s a bumper crop.”—Salon
 
“Buck is so honest it floats—even while it’s so down-to-earth that the reader feels like an ant peering up from the concrete. It’s a powerful book. . . . Asante is a hip-hop raconteur, a storyteller in the Homeric tradition, an American, a rhymer, a big-thinker singing a song of himself. You’ll want to listen.”—The Buffalo News

“The book’s strength lies in Asante’s vibrant, specific observations, and, at times, the percussive prose that captures them. The author’s fluid, filmic images of black urban life feel unique and disturbing.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Asante’s noir chronicle is imaginative, powerful, and electric, written with passion and conviction.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“This is an inspiring story about perseverance and finding purpose that is sure to appeal to readers interested in hip-hop, black studies, and American pop culture in general.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Buck takes the daily words of the American streets and forges something low and lovely. Angry, profane, and beautiful, it honors the best of hip-hop’s literary canon by producing a work worthy of inclusion.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of The Beautiful Struggle
 
“Buck sings a song that will force all of America to face what it has become and remember what it could be.”—Eddie Huang, author of Fresh off the Boat