Title: Losing My Cool:: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture
Author: Thomas Chatterton Williams
Publisher: Penguin Press HC
Publication Date: April 29, 2010
Hardcover: 240 pages
ISBN: 978-1594202636
Genre: Biography/Memoir
From the Publisher:
Into Williams’s childhood home-a one-story ranch house-his father crammed more books than the local library could hold. “Pappy” used some of these volumes to run an academic prep service; the rest he used in his unending pursuit of wisdom. His son’s pursuits were quite different-”money, hoes, and clothes.” The teenage Williams wore Medusa- faced Versace sunglasses and a hefty gold medallion, dumbed down and thugged up his speech, and did whatever else he could to fit into the intoxicating hip-hop culture that surrounded him. Like all his friends, he knew exactly where he was the day Biggie Smalls died, he could recite the lyrics to any Nas or Tupac song, and he kept his woman in line, with force if necessary.
But Pappy, who grew up in the segregated South and hid in closets so he could read Aesop and Plato, had a different destiny in mind for his son. For years, Williams managed to juggle two disparate lifestyles- “keeping it real” in his friends’ eyes and studying for the SATs under his father’s strict tutelage. As college approached and the stakes of the thug lifestyle escalated, the revolving door between Williams’s street life and home life threatened to spin out of control. Ultimately, Williams would have to decide between hip-hop and his future. Would he choose “street dreams” or a radically different dream- the one Martin Luther King spoke of or the one Pappy held out to him now?
Williams is the first of his generation to measure the seductive power of hip-hop against its restrictive worldview, which ultimately leaves those who live it powerless. Losing My Cool portrays the allure and the danger of hip-hop culture like no book has before. Even more remarkably, Williams evokes the subtle salvation that literature offers and recounts with breathtaking clarity a burgeoning bond between father and son.
My Review:
Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams describes Thomas’s life growing up and the lure of the hip-hop culture, his struggle for identity, and the love of family. Thomas was born in 1981 to Kathleen and Clarence Thomas, and inter-racial couple who explained to their sons at a very young age that they were black. Yet the family chose to place their sons in a Catholic school to educate them in hopes of providing a safe environment for them. At a young age, Thomas began searching for an identity by watching the boys at the barbershop as well as watching the BET station, where he first views rappers on television. Not truly understanding what the lyrics are saying, he is astute enough to realise to fit in he must act as the other boys do. The culture, while alluring, was an extremely negative influence on Thomas and his peers while his parents faced daunting odds to keep their son on track. At no time is the author trying to criticize hip-hop music as a whole and freely admits some of it has positive messages, but rather, he is dealing with the hip-hop culture in this memoir. Losing My Cool is a wonderfully descriptive book describing the lure of the hip-hop culture and the struggle to get out of the idea this culture represents. Williams details his father’s private lessons with his sons to educate their minds. Losing My Cool is an extraordinary look at a subset of culture through personal experience, as well as anthropological and philosophical discussions about this subset of culture. Losing My Cool was not only an interesting book to read; I found it to be intellectually stimulating and extremely informative. I would recommend this book to those interested in the topic as well as to book discussion groups.
Thomas Chatterton Williams holds a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Georgetown University and a Master’s degree from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. In 2007, he wrote an op-ed piece entitled “Yes, Blame Hip-Hop” for the Washington Post which generated a record-breaking number of comments. He writes for the literary magazine n+1 and currently lives in Brooklyn.
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I received a complimentary copy of Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams from TLC Book Tours. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned novel.
Where do I begin commenting??? Love your blog. I like it better than the other one. It’s adorable. I’ve never heard of Thomas Chatterton. I’m glad you gave the Twitter addy and the face book addy too. How in the world did you pick the colors? Love it.
Thank you. I love my new look.
I picked out the header picture and let my designer run with it. She did a good job. Losing My Cool is a wonderful book, I hope you read it.
I like memoirs about people who have faced struggles, so this sounds good to me.
Losing My Cool is an excellent look into, for me, another culture and way of thinking. Thomas and his parents are amazing people.
This sounds very interesting. Thanks for the sound and positive review.