Talk about books that transform language. M.K. Asante's coming of age memoir, Buck, tells of come up. The locale: the gritty streets of Killadelphia. The cast of characters: family, friends, and troublemakers. How can the son of an esteemed professor go through such wretchedness, you ask? It bees like that sometimes. Brimming with poetic slang, Buck masters the art of the ghetto simile, brings the dozens to the next level while orbiting everything-- dialogue, common wisdom, general consciousness--around Hip-Hop. It grants ink to every facet of Black life from the block to the barbershop, to the basketball court to (unfortunately) the jail cell. Asante reminds us what we loved about Down These Mean Streets and Manchild in the Promised Land, adding a squirt of prose blood fresh enough to snuggle a place into the Afro-American literary canon.
