Gunshots in My Cook-Up: Bits and Bites of a Hip-Hop Caribbean Life

Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, noted music journalist and former editor-in-chief of The Source, brings us Gunshots in My Cook-Up. It's an extraordinary memoir that focuses on hip-hop culture — its American existence, its international appeal, and more intimately, its affect on the author's life. Hinds chronicles this long and bumpy relationship that began the moment his nine-year-old eyes and ears drank in "Rapper's Delight" in Guyana, and continued with his eventual migration to Brooklyn as a teenager, on through his adult role as a player and pundit in our present culture of hip-hop primacy.

The lively narrative presents a host of moving portraits of life in the hip-hop trenches. It opens an un-precedented window on the pain and beauty in being five-time Grammy award-winner Lauryn Hill; the pensive, controlling tendencies of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs; the vulnerabilities underlying Dr. Dre's gangster-for-life exterior; the runaway creative energy of the gifted songwriter Wyclef Jean; the perpetual drive of Russell Simmons; and much more.

Through the intimate interviews and recollections of the celebrities that pepper the narrative, alongside deeply affecting, personal musings, Hinds traces the heights and depths of his hip-hop love affair. He takes the reader on a vivid exploration: a murky nightclub in the violent streets of late-eighties Brooklyn; the campus of an Ivy League university caught up in the throes of political rap during the early nineties; a curbside in Los Angeles where the Notorious B.I.G. has just been shot; the achingly poor streets of Port-au-Prince Haiti, as a sea of black humanity surges to touch a hip-hop native son; and within the churnings of his own mind as he struggles to make sense of a love that drifts all too often to ambivalence, even hate.

Gunshots in My Cook-Up is refreshingly original, a clear-eyed take on an American-born phenomenon gone global that continues to conjure curses and blessings. Like the disparate ingredients in the Guyanese rice dish "cook-up" from which the title stems, the broad terrain staked out by the book's individual essays pulls together into a seamless whole. The writing is so beautiful and engaging you simply cannot put this book down, whether or not you're an adherent of hip-hop or of today's youth culture.

1. I Write This For...

2. My Brother the Rap Star

3. Starlite Nightsÿ

4. To Herÿ

5. Young Black Teenagers

6. My Uzi Weighs a Ton

7. Ills of a Nation

8. The Source of It All

9. Bullets Over Tinseltownÿ

10. Streets Is Watchingÿÿ

11. Return of Preacher Son

12. Coming Home

13. The Sweetest Thing [Observation]ÿ

14. Home of the Beastÿ

15. The Makerÿ

16. Me, Machine: The Curious Case of a Man Called Seanÿ

17. Spirit Diary

18. The Sweetest Thing [Rationalization]

19. Rush Hourÿ

20. Fathers and Daughters

21. Props Given