Losing My Cool

May 15, 2010
First-time author Williams offers a revealing memoir on a par with James McBride's "The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother" (1996) and Bakari Kitwana's more scholarly "The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture" (2002). "Losing My Cool" is the story of a mixed-race young man's intellectual journey, in which he examines the impact of cultural forces on today's youth. Williams effectively conveys the convergences and dichotomies that his life comes to reflect: frontin' with his boyz vs. mandated study with his taciturn father. As the story unfolds and Williams takes to philosophical self-examination, this juxtaposition highlights the tenuous balance today's youth face in traversing the path between peer/cultural pressure and intellectual success, while examining the negative effect one's cultural identification can have both on the individual and the collective. VERDICT Recommended for YA readers, undergraduates, and readers in sociology or urban studies.Jewell Anderson, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ. Lib, Savannah, GA

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Starred review from May 15, 2010
Growing up in Westfield, New Jersey, with a father who loved wisdom and ran an SAT prep business in a home crammed with books, Williams blithely ignored all that in favor of the hip-hop culture he heard and saw on BET. He spent his youth meticulously studying and imitating images of cool and thuggishness and listening to music that glorified misogyny, violence, and bling. The objective was to be authentically black, despite his white mother and erudite father. He modeled the thug life with a hair-trigger temper that led to fights and a ghetto-fabulous girlfriend, living on the margins of drug dealing. At Georgetown, he continued the cool persona until he began to gradually face up to evidence that it would lead to failure and that a more interesting life might be available to him. Only then does he acknowledge the gift of his fathers efforts to get him to appreciate the value of being able to truly and deeply think for himself. This is more than a coming-of-age story; it is an awakening, as Williams blends Dostoyevsky and Jay-Z in a compelling memoir and analysis of urban youth culture.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)