Losing My Cool

By: Thomas Chatterton Williams

Narrated by: Thomas Chatterton Williams

Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

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 15,000 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.

©2010 Thomas Chatterton Williams (P)2010 Penguin

Phenomenal

As a racialized white person, I don't know what to say. His insight, though traveling through the lens of the Racialized Black experience, helped me to review how I think about my own self and the ways in which I limit myself because of the labels and signs we hang on ourselves. I'll be buying the paper version of this book ASAP.

Very revealing about life

Narrator was great. I love the honesty of the author; allowing us a view into the supposed coolness of black culture but then showing us how and why he relinquished it.

An unorthodox bildungsroman

Losing my cool is the story of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ youth and intellectual coming of age, against the backdrop of the hip hop culture of the 80’s and 90’s. This is a culture with which Williams identifies strongly for many of his formative years, but gradually comes to understand as prescribing a restrictive set of acceptable behaviours, desires and thought.

Ultimately Williams levels a firm critique of what he has experienced as the stultifying effects of these cultural expectations. This seems to be the primary source of enmity behind strongly negative reviews of the book. Don’t read Losing My Cool for the final word on hip hop culture, but rather as a compelling personal account of a racialized youth intertwined in this culture, but growing ultimately towards a life on terms of Williams’ own. Williams father features prominently as a deeply supportive figure who holds learning and true self-realisation (hard-won in his own case) as the highest ideals for his children.

A window into another culture

As a suburban 50 year old white woman I really appreciated the insider's view into the hip-hop culture. Fascinating and very easy to listen to. I have purchased the book for my kids because not only do you learn about hip-hop, there is also a lot of thought about how we choose to live our lives (not surprising given that the author is a philosopher).

Greatness

Great book....a must read read for any african-american person.I grew a lot of inspiration from Williams's memoir!

15000 Books and Hip-hop Culture

I ordered this book because it covered a topic (Hip-hop and its culture) that I know little about. I am always looking for books that will inform and Williams has fulfilled that need on many levels. This is the essentially the first person tale of Thomas Williams and his life with a loving, well educated and well read father. Williams gets caught up in the Hip-hop culture and ultimately finds his way to a much enriched life including - books.

This is a coming of age book which is fulfilling on one level and first person explanation of hip-hop culture its influence on the author. The book is expertly written and wonderfully read by the author. It certainly expanded my apprciation for memoir, hip-hop culture, and reading. Give this one a try.

Eye Opening

Entertaining and enlightening and occasionally shocking. An inside look to the real black America.

Thought Provoking Memoir

As a black American male who grew up in an interracial family, I really appreciate Thomas Chatterton Williams’ perspective. This memoir is a must-listen for people of all races.

June 2020

Listening to this book on Junteenth, one week after the BLM protests. This is what everyone needs to hear but what is not being said by the mainstream. There are so many great things to be learned from and reflected on within this book.

Skrt Skrt on the Soul

TCW illustrates an intrinsic struggle beseeched by youth of various backgrounds through the interpolation of hip hop. His experience of flowing through class and culture, (often on visa in these spaces), he weaves the benefits of assimilation, but only to question at what cost? His questioning of the soundtrack to his life in juxtaposition to his father and personal achievement gives a supple tension that engages readers -- (and most definitely hip hop heads). He reads his work very well, and sonically is not droll at all. Wu Tang Forever