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

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.

Into Williams's childhood home — a one-story ranch house — his father crammed more books than the local library could hold. Pappy used some of these volumes to run an academic prep service; the rest he used in his unending pursuit of wisdom. His son's pursuits were quite different — money, hoes, and clothes. The teenage Williams wore Medusa-faced Versace sunglasses and a hefty gold medallion, dumbed down and thugged up his speech, and did whatever else he could to fit into the intoxicating hip-hop culture that surrounded him. Like all his friends, he knew exactly where he was the day Biggie Smalls died, he could recite the lyrics to any Nas or Tupac song, and he kept his woman in line, with force if necessary.

But Pappy, who grew up in the segregated South and hid in closets so he could read Aesop and Plato, had a different destiny in mind for his son. For years, Williams managed to juggle two disparate lifestyles — keeping it real in his friends' eyes and studying for the SATs under his father's strict tutelage. As college approached and the stakes of the thug lifestyle escalated, the revolving door between Williams's street life and home life threatened to spin out of control. Ultimately, Williams would have to decide between hip-hop and his future. Would he choose street dreams or a radically different dream — the one Martin Luther King spoke of or the one Pappy held out to him now?

Williams is the first of his generation to measure the seductive power of hip-hop against its restrictive worldview, which ultimately leaves those who live it powerless. Losing My Cool portrays the allure and the danger of hip-hop culture like no book has before. Even more remarkably, Williams evokes the subtle salvation that literature offers and recounts with breathtaking clarity a burgeoning bond between father and son.

"In Williams' debut, he offers a memoir that focuses on his upbringing, primarily credited to a father who instilled in him a value of education and mature study habits over sports and recreation. Williams recalls that he spent many summer days growing up pouring over flash cards or his seemingly never-ending stack of books, while his peers swam and played outside. What little free time he had he spent at a local park playing basketball and idolizing the older boys, one in particular who loved Hip-Hop and had gained the street cred that came from violence when defending one's honor. Williams credits Hip-Hop and its legends for his ever-growing curiosity of what it means to be black, and initially considered popular rappers to be historians of African American culture. As Williams enters adulthood and begins his first semester at Georgetown, he meets people of many different ethnicities and cultures and his opinions of the black identity begin to change. Williams' innate respect for knowledge and analysis emerges, and he discovers the value of the people around him and real experience over image." Publishers Weekly (Copyright © Reed Business Information, Inc. All rights reserved.)

"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. (Starred Review)" Booklist

"Williams...highlights the tenuous balance today's youth face in traversing the path between peer/cultural pressure and intellectual success...Recommended." Library Journal

Thomas Chatterton Williams holds a Bachelor's degree in philosophy from Georgetown University and a Master's degree from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. He has written for the Washington Post and n+1. He lives in Brooklyn, NY