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    Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture
    Unavailable
    Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture
    Unavailable
    Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture
    Audiobook5 hours

    Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Unabridged, 7 hours

    Read by the author

    A pitch-perfect account of how hip-hop culture drew in the author and how his father drew him out again-with love, perseverance, and fifteen thousand books.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 29, 2010
    ISBN9781101196328
    Unavailable
    Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture

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    Reviews for Losing My Cool

    4.5/5

    29 ratings6 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Wonderful memoir - I really love the way this guy writes, and what he writes about. A remarkably courageous book.
    • 4/5
      I zoomed through this in a day. I was reallyinterested in how the author changed his mindset from one of immersion in hip-hop culture to one focused on philosophy at the collegiate level. I would like some of my teaching colleagues to read it and see if there are any overall ideas that can come from the author's journey, or if it's just one person's (interesting) story of their personal paradigm shift.
    • 5/5
      A young adult biographical book, but highly recommended for concerned parents, grandparents and educators of all ages. Inspirational and insightful. A coming of age story of a black youth driven to excell by a very wise and determined father. Demonstates different lifestyles and the potential there is to achieve academic success. Education happens inside and out side of high school and college. This would make and excellent class or discussion group book.
    • 5/5
      I learned of this book after reading a Stanley Crouch column about President Obama and his I-Pod. Williams was critical of Obama listing Lil' Wayne as being on his play list. Should POTUS listen to a thug like Lil' Wayne. So I hustled down to my public library and picked up Losing my Cool. I taught in public schools for 36 years and saw some examples that Williams cites. Some students limit their world by trying to keep it real. They close off options for themselves and call it keeping it real. It is sad to see and it makes you angry at the adults in the entertainment industry. I would like to see this book in high school libraries.
    • 5/5
      From My Blog...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.
    • 5/5
      It is always easier for an outsider to be objective about an unfamiliar culture than it is for someone totally immersed in that same culture, especially when strict conformity to the accepted norm of the culture serves as a means of survival within it. I recognize, however, that an outsider brings his own baggage and bias into any discussion about a culture foreign to his eyes. And when it comes to the hip-hop culture that so completely dominates overall black culture today, especially the lives of its younger members, I am absolutely an outsider. But, as such, I have long wondered how, and why, American blacks have allowed their culture and their image as a people to be disgraced by something as shallow and destructive as hip-hop. "In Losing My Cool," Thomas Chatterton Williams explores how the hip-hop culture came to dominate Black America and what needs to be done to counter its terrible influence on young people. As the subtitle to his book ("How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture") indicates, Thomas Chatterton Williams was one of the lucky ones. It was a close call, but he saw through the false bravado of hip-hop before it was too late for him to make something of his life. Williams and his brother are the products of the marriage between a white woman from California and a black man from Galveston, Texas. The boys grew up in a New Jersey home in which their father stressed to them that learning is a skill that needs to be practiced each and every day. There were no days off for Thomas. His friends might be wasting their summers by posing as thugs on the streets and local basketball courts but Thomas was spending hours preparing for his next school year or prepping for the SAT examination. His father, largely a self-educated man, led by example; the man practically devoured books. He did not just read them; he had conversations with them, leaving notes and underlined passages on practically every page he read. But for Thomas, as for everyone else he grew up with, hip-hop culture trumped whatever good influence he received at home from his parents. As he puts it, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. To survive, I drank in my community's mores, including its fear of learning, even as I capitulated to my father's seemingly eccentric will at home...had mastered the delicate balance of keeping it real and keeping Pappy satisfied at the same time." Even after the countless hours of study with his father paid off in a scholarship to Georgetown University, Thomas continued to immerse himself exclusively in the world of his fellow black students. He paid no attention to his white dormitory mates, skipped class as much as he attended it, and spent as much time as possible with the black students of Howard University, where he felt totally at home because its students were living exactly the debasing lifestyle he knew from high school. Thomas Chatterton Williams, though, is a learner and, by his second year at Georgetown, he began to realize just how badly the hip-hop culture had cheated him and his peers out of the finer things of life. They had been compelled to embrace a dishonorable lifestyle, one with no dignity and no future. Thomas discarded a culture that promoted self-hatred, denigrated women, and ridiculed books and learning for his own vision of what a man should be. Thanks to Pappy's influence, Thomas embraced the degree of non-conformity that allowed him to become the man his father always hoped he would become. "Losing My Cool" is a frank look at what has gone wrong in Black America. Williams points his finger at the culprits - and he names them. Sadly, those who would most benefit from the lessons in "Losing My Cool" are the least likely to read the book, either because they cannot, or because they will not. Either way, that is a tragedy. Rated at: 5.0