Buck: A Memoir

Buck: A Memoir

A rebellious boyâ€™s journey through the wilds of urban America and the shrapnel of a self-destructing familyâ€”this is the riveting story of a generation told through one dazzlingly poetic new voice.
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MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: a mother who led the new nationâ€™s dance company and a father who would soon become a revered pioneer in black studies. But things fell apart, and a decade later MK was in America, a teenager lost in a fog of drugs, sex, and violence on the streets of North Philadelphia. Now he was aloneâ€”his mother in a mental hospital, his father gone, his older brother locked up in a prison on the other side of the countryâ€”and forced to find his own way to survive physically, mentally, and spiritually, by any means necessary.
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Buck is a powerful memoir of how a precocious kid educated himself through the most unconventional teachersâ€”outlaws and eccentrics, rappers and mystic strangers, ghetto philosophers and strippers, and, eventually, an alternative school that transformed his life with a single blank sheet of paper. Itâ€™s a one-of-a-kind story about finding your purpose in life, and an inspiring tribute to the power of education, art, and love to heal and redeem us.

Praise for Buck
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â€œA story of surviving and thriving with passion, compassion, wit, and style.â€â€”Maya AngelouÂ
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â€œIn America, we have a tradition of black writers whose autobiographies and memoirs come to define an era. . . . Buck may be this generationâ€™s story.â€â€”NPR

â€œThe voice of a new generation. . . . You will love nearly everything about Buck.â€â€”Essence

â€œA 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.â€â€”The Philadelphia Inquirer

â€œFrequently 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. Phillyâ€™s skateboarders, its street-corner philosophers and its tattoo artists are all brought vividly to life here. . . . Asanteâ€™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.â€â€”Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

â€œRemarkable . . . Asanteâ€™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 itâ€™s a bumper crop.â€â€”Salon
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â€œBuck is so honest it floatsâ€”even while itâ€™s so down-to-earth that the reader feels like an ant peering up from the concrete. Itâ€™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. Youâ€™ll want to listen.â€â€”The Buffalo News

Country	USA
Author	MK Asante
Binding	Hardcover
Brand	Brand: Spiegel Grau
EAN	9780812993417
Edition	1st
Feature	Used Book in Good Condition
ISBN	0812993411
Label	Spiegel & Grau
Manufacturer	Spiegel & Grau
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	272
PublicationDate	2013-08-20
Publisher	Spiegel & Grau
ReleaseDate	2013-08-20
Studio	Spiegel & Grau

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