Buck: A Memoir

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