Buck: A Memoir

Written by:
MK Asante
Narrated by:
MK Asante , Adenrele Ojo

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
10
Narrator
4
Release Date
August 2013
Duration
5 hours 47 minutes
Summary
A rebellious boy’s journey through the wilds of urban America and the shrapnel of a self-destructing family—this is the riveting story of a generation told through one dazzlingly poetic new voice.
 
MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: a mother who led the new nation’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 alone—his mother in a mental hospital, his father gone, his older brother locked up in a prison on the other side of the country—and forced to find his own way to survive physically, mentally, and spiritually, by any means necessary.
 
Buck is a powerful memoir of how a precocious kid educated himself through the most unconventional teachers—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. It’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
 
“A story of surviving and thriving with passion, compassion, wit, and style.”—Maya Angelou 
 
“In America, we have a tradition of black writers whose autobiographies and memoirs come to define an era. . . . Buck may be this generation’s story.”—NPR

“The voice of a new generation. . . . You will love nearly everything about Buck.”—Essence

“A 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.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Frequently 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. Philly’s skateboarders, its street-corner philosophers and its tattoo artists are all brought vividly to life here. . . . Asante’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.”—Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

“Remarkable . . . Asante’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 it’s a bumper crop.”—Salon
 
“Buck is so honest it floats—even while it’s so down-to-earth that the reader feels like an ant peering up from the concrete. It’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. You’ll want to listen.”—The Buffalo News
Reviews
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Latoya L.

GOD SAVES? WHERE? NOT IN KILLADEPHIA, PISTOLVANIA! This story had me hooked from the beginning to end. The story is about Malo, the protagonist and his brother Uzi. The analogies used throughout this book were spot on, along with the quotes from famous authors. Milo, runs because that's the only thing that saves him from dying. Boy's trying to live in the trails/stigmas of being black in the world. Uzi turned from a boy into a man, while in prison, his spirit changed, even in his eyes. Milo challenges himself to read and learn more daily. "People get use to anything, the less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. Like it's a normal state of things, but to become truly free you have to be acutely aware of being a slave". He learns that writing is like speaking another language, it can be explored by anyone who reads it. just as a thermometer or thermostats, one's the temperature while the other reflects it; he wants his writing to be like a thermostat. Some of the apologies/quotes that stuck out to me were below: Afrocentricity means black people should view the world through their own black eyes. People without knowledge their past is like a tree without roots. You can be born in Georgia, but that doesn't make you more American than a water in a log. African proverb, no matter how long a log sits in the water, it'll never be a crocodile. Expectation before Assimilation. I can go on and on about this book. Great read, I reccomend any young man of color to read this. I will be passing this one on to my son. #book18of2019 #bookworm #whatsnext

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