The tale of a crime lord that’s as vicious, graphic and entertaining as anything out there today.
A generation ago, Nicky Barnes was notorious as Harlem’s prime retailer of quality heroin. Now he tells his gripping story.
Of course, it must not be the whole story, but what there is smacks of attitude. It is a chronicle of Barnes’s thug life, complete with his crew, his women, his warriors and his enemies on both sides of the law. It’s low life living the high life, tax-free, with lots of freaky sex, many penthouse apartments, pricey cars and heavy bling before it was called bling. Barnes was featured in a lead piece in the New York Times Magazine and inspired the hit “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” Back in the day, he says, the city was his. Learning from the mob, he formed a Council to manage the distribution of drugs and eliminate any DEA snitch who was fingered by his potent counterintelligence. We learn, in pointed language, of booze, weed and guns. The ways of each mo-fo and of every ho is sharply etched. Eventually, his “continuing criminal enterprise” collapsed. (Insufficient family values, Barnes supposes.) The author went to federal prison and when he couldn’t run the Council (or his women) from the joint, he destroyed it (and them). Now, still proud of his superior intelligence, he is in the witness protection program. His fierce text says virtually nothing of the effect of his enterprise on the customers he supplied. That isn’t a concern in this brutal, scorching book.
The tale of a crime lord that’s as vicious, graphic and entertaining as anything out there today.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-59071-041-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Rugged Land
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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