Street Kingdom: Five Years inside the Franklin Avenue Posse Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Street Kingdom: Five Years inside the Franklin Avenue Posse Book

Rookie author Douglas Century delivers a gritty account of street life in urban America. Street Kingdom started out in 1992 as an odd-couple friendship between Century, a Jewish-Canadian Princeton alum, and Big K, a black New Yorker trying to overcome his criminal past and become a rap star. Their five-year relationship--full of culture clashes at turns funny, depressing, and harrowing--allows Century to examine prison life, the sociology of gangs, and the meaning of success in the 1990s. Big K is an irresistible character study: a 270-pound, larger-than-life, one-man melting pot with roots in Jamaica and Panama. His raps blend Caribbean slang, Spanish influences, and the sensibilities (and insensibilities) of urban America. The book's heavy use of profanity may be authentic, but it's also numbing, and Century's decision to use aliases diminishes his otherwise fine journalism. Yet there is much to recommend: the narrative is strong, and Century (who has written for Forward and the New York Times) occasionally recalls the powerful work of Alex Kotlowitz and Ron Suskind. Readers interested in the human side of urban pathology will want to discover this promising new talent. --John J. MillerRead More

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  • Product Description

    From the groundbreaking debut author whose work invites comparisons to Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Richard Price comes an inside portrait of the Franking Avenue Posse, one of Brooklyn's most-feared street crews. The resulting investigative memoir is a singular journalistic achievement whose explosive yet lyrical immediacy marks a triumph of personal, firsthand reportage.

    It began as a chance encounter - the night in 1992 when Douglas Century, a white, Ivy League-educated journalist, met Big K, a young streetwise hip-hop artist, at a night-club on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Gradually, under Big K's aegis, Century was drawn deep into the urban vortex portrayed in the rapper's remarkable lyrics. Becoming K's confidant and sounding board, Century found himself riding shotgun with the Posse and hearing their untold story - how, a decade ago, at the height of New York's crackwars, K and his Crown Heights crew "stood knee-deep in drug money" and kept an entire borough "runnin' red."

    Now, through Century's affecting presentense narrative, we see both Big K's brutal past and his life today-juggling the pursuit of a rap career and his daytime security jobs, all the time walking the difficult line that separates "straight life" and the street. We meet K's crew of "hardrocks" - Brooklynese for "gangstas" - former stickup kids, gunrunners, and coke dealers in the eerie, ink-black Brooklyn night. And we enter New York's infamous juvenile prisons where frightened children become hardened badmen...and travel inside the maximum-security penitentiaries like Sing Sing and Clinton where Posse members are still serving time.

    A gritty authentic inside perspective on the mysterious criminal underworld, STREET KINGDOM provides a dramatic, sobering counterpoint to the aura of glamour that "gangsta rap" has attached to drug dealing and street violence. Writing in a gripping, kinetic style that is equal parts philosophical reflection and cinematic voiceover, Century unfolds a true-life saga of life on Brooklyn's deadliest streets, a world of physical and psychological peril in which only the strongest survive.

  • 044652266X
  • 9780446522663
  • Douglas Century
  • 1 February 1999
  • Warner Books
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 415
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