Street Kingdom: Five Years Inside the Franklin Avenue Posse

"Street Kingdom" is in one sense a marvelous adventure book: we follow journalist-memoirist Century through the criminal subculture and urban decay with Big K (one of the most memorable charactrs I have encountered in recent nonfiction). But it is also a story of a friendship--and a heartbreaking one at that. This is a thrilling journey, but also a book which asks deep, penetrating and often unsettling questions about the coexistence of races in America today; about the logic of locking away huge segments of the population (only, it seems, to turn them into "better criminals"); about the nature of friendship itself.

This book took me into a world I knew so little about, but I feel I learned a great deal from the experience. Century writes in impassioned prose, and makes the world of these Brooklyn kids come alive on the page for the reader. There is considerable profanity, which wasn't too my taste, but I felt it was an aspect of the realism of the street life described.

I picked up Street Kingdom by chance and found it to be a fantastic read, filled with great characters, a gripping story, written by a young author with pitch-perfect ear for dialogue. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in American life -- particularly youth culture -- at the turn of the century.

Having read -- and enjoyed -- "Street Kingdom," I feel compelled to respond to the customer review posted on March 29 under the headline "Sad, Wrongheaded, Insulting to Black Readers." While reviews are obviously a matter of personal opinion and taste, this reviewer seems not to have read the same book I did. In fact, he/she writes, "the book SOUNDS like most attempts to "humanize' blackness" -- "sounds like?" Did you actually crack the pages of the book and begin to read? Or did you base your opinion/review on what you heard second-hand? "Street Kingdom" is a very complex portrait of a subculture and Century's own involvement in it; he does not sugarcoat the unflattering aspects he witnesses; but by the same token, he does not villify or editorialize on the people whose lives he is documenting. The reviewer goes on to note: "This is the kind of book that most liberal white Americans believe helps to promote racial tolerance; instead it sets the race movement back." What?! If you are looking for a book that promotes "racial tolerance," pick up the new autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. And "race movement?" I'm not even sure what this means. Are we living in 1969? Lastly, the reviewer chastizes Century for "fixating, sometimes with peculiar intensity, on the up-and-down lives of his black subjects." Forgive me, but I think that's called REPORTING. A good journalist is supposed to fixate, hopefully with some degree of intensity, on the lives of his fellow human beings. Again, this reviewer shows his/her own "wrongheaded" biases by instructing us that Century "like most naive white liberals-- should fixate first on his own racial sensitivities, expectations and attitudes." A bizarre statement, given the degree to which the author places his own reactions and perspective at the core of his story; this is certainly a book that says as much about one white writer's encounters with a segment of African-American culture as it does about that culture itself. Perhaps that's what's best -- and ground-breaking -- about "Street Kingdom"; and it's what's most difficult for dogmatic, pre-programmed minds to accept.

Century has given us an account of his five year friendship with members of a Brooklyn street gang, and in particular with one young African-American man known, among other things, as Big K.The child of Jamaican immigrants from Panama,Big K has been involved in robbery and killings, and has spent time upstate. He seems to have been arrested innumerable times, but somehow seems, until the end of the book, to have avoided lengthy incarceration. Upstate institutions have been his schools. He has dealt drugs, sought to become a professional boxer, aspires to be a rap artist. He has also held regular jobs and has a wife and children. He and I live in the same city, but our lifestyles are worlds apart. Inspite of his criminal activities and his violent explosions of temper, he strikes me as a sympathic figure. He was mistreated as a child and never got the care he had a right to expect. It seems that he is the product of a terrible necessity, but then perhaps we are all products of necessity.And Big K is not without virtues and talents. He is a faithful friend, he cares for his wife and children, he aspires to a better life. And not only is he a skilled rapper, but in conversation he expresses himself in phrases that capture the feeling behind his remarks. This is a book, which to me, give a picture of a fellow human being.