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Crack
- Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed
- Narrated by: Kerry Shale
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
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Publisher's summary
A shattering account of the crack cocaine years from award-winning American historian David Farber, Crack tells the story of the young men who bet their lives on the rewards of selling "rock" cocaine, the people who gave themselves over to the crack pipe, and the often-merciless authorities who incarcerated legions of African Americans caught in the crack cocaine underworld.
Based on interviews, archival research, judicial records, underground videos, and prison memoirs, Crack explains why, in a de-industrializing America in which market forces ruled and entrepreneurial risk-taking was celebrated, the crack industry was a lucrative enterprise for the "Horatio Alger boys" of their place and time. These young, predominately African American entrepreneurs were profit-sharing partners in a deviant, criminal form of economic globalization. Hip Hop artists often celebrated their exploits but overwhelmingly, Americans - across racial lines - did not. Crack takes a hard look at the dark side of late 20th-century capitalism.
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Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics - and their impact on people of color - are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime.
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Outstanding Book
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A Colony in a Nation
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Emmy Award-winning news anchor and New York Times best-selling author Chris Hayes argues that there are really two Americas: a Colony and a Nation. America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, but nearly every empirical measure - wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation - reveals that racial inequality hasn't improved since 1968.
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So much to this book!
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McMafia
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Misha Glenny's groundbreaking study of global organized crime is now the inspiration for an eight-part AMC crime drama starring James Norton (War and Peace), Juliet Rylance, and David Strathairn. In this fearless and wholly authoritative investigation of the seemingly insatiable demand for illegal wares, veteran reporter Misha Glenny travels across five continents to speak with participants from every level of the global underworld. What follows is a groundbreaking, propulsive look at an unprecedented phenomenon from a savvy, street-wise guide.
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Worthwhile Overview
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A Savage Order
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From Georgia to Colombia to Ghana and Italy - crime exists in every democratic nation on earth, but in some places, it runs rampant, shaping all aspects of civic life. A Savage Order investigates why and how some places, riddled by inept government and states, are able to recover. Drawing on fifteen years of both academic and firsthand field research, Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld documents the unambiguous measures that societies have taken to empower the strong civic movements, governments, and institutions that protect countries and mitigate atrocities that damage people's lives.
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Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western listeners can explore the fascinating history of the vory v zakone, a group that has survived and thrived amid the changes brought on by Stalinism, the Cold War, the Afghan War, and the end of the Soviet experiment.
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Great
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Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire the events of 2020 had clear precursors - and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s strife, America on Fire is also a warning: Rebellions will surely continue until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.
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Giant leaps of logic
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Forget what you think you know about the Mafia. After reading this book, even life-long mob aficionados will have a new perspective on organized crime. Informative, authoritative, and eye-opening, this is the first full-length book devoted exclusively to uncovering the hidden history of how the Mafia came to dominate organized crime in New York City during the 1930s through 1950s.
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Hard one to rate....
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In the ashes of postwar Japan lay a gold mine for certain opportunistic, expatriate Americans. Addicted to the volatile energy of Tokyo's freewheeling underworld, they formed ever-shifting but ever-profitable alliances with warring Japanese and Korean gangsters. At the center of this world was Nick Zappetti, an ex-marine from New York City who arrived in Tokyo in 1945 and whose restaurant soon became the rage throughout the city and the chief watering hole for celebrities, diplomats, sports figures, and mobsters.
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A Man with a fork in a world of soup
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Reefer Madness
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In Reefer Madness, the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation investigates America's black market and its far-reaching influence on our society through three of its mainstays - pot, porn, and illegal immigrants.
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Great Investigative Journalism
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America, says Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges, is convulsed by an array of pathologies that have arisen out of profound hopelessness, a bitter despair and a civil society that has ceased to function. The opioid crisis, the retreat into gambling to cope with economic distress, the pornification of culture, the rise of magical thinking, the celebration of sadism, hate, and plagues of suicides are the physical manifestations of a society that is being ravaged by corporate pillage and a failed democracy. All these ills presage a frightening reconfiguration of the nation and the planet.
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Terrible narrator for the book
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What listeners say about Crack
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- James Heggs
- 11-23-22
He got it right
You never know exactly if an author penning a book like this actually cares about the root of the story. I’ll say this one does. I was born in 76 and was very much on deck during cracks rise and reign. The book really gives you perspective on drugs in America in the 20th century and how it lead to the crack years. It also digs into the day to day reality of why guys like some of my boys sold crack. The hip hop connection is also a good chapter as gangsters have long used the record industry to clean their money. And I like the ending. There is at times way too much romanticizing about the crack era. It was brutal. NOTHING in 2022 or 2015 or 2008 can compare. Anyone who thinks we are even remotely approaching the 90’s level of violence either wasn’t old enough to know what was going on in the streets -were of age but was in the house most of the time or was too old then to really know the ins and outs. A few years back in my old hood I had to stop and think -I hadn’t heard guns shots in a while…that’s the measure of how bad things were. Sure the violence is still in the hood. But it’s not anywhere near what it was back in 1992.
The crack era’s arms race let that horse outta the barn and it ain’t never going back.
Also the same economic conditions that produced crack has -as Slim Charles from “The Wire” said gotten more fierce. Broke people and easy access to guns (legal or not) is a bad combination.
These days the kids are doing scams, makes sense. You need less than you did with crack. Who doesn’t own a computer or a smart phone? And there are no shootouts for turf.
The only thing not discussed was the flipping money out of state phenomenon. That was huge. Most of my boys who hustled made a boat load of money “OT”. For example a quarter key (fishscale) copped in New York for $3000 could be flipped (and was) by my closet homey for 9-11 G’s. New York crews were hated for “Wal Marting” the local drug markets in the South and upstate. That would’ve been a fascinating topic to discuss.
Don’t forget these were still young boys, 16-17 going to cities and towns -far from home -they never knew of or never been to-to hustle crack! Absolutely bonkers!!!
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- DKC
- 05-16-21
Good book
Appreciate Farber’s research and the scope of the book. Important work. The reader’s impersonation of AA men and women bordered on disrespectful and comical. He sounded like a 1970’s black exploitation film pimp. It was embarrassing to listen to his version of black males and females. Choose better next time…
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- sally satel
- 02-16-20
Excellent overview of a dramatic era in drug control
Very good concise history. Only one compliant, for the love of God do NOT allow narrators to perform dialogue. It’s distracting, condescending, and they often sound ridiculous. Really detracts from listening experience
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- Renee
- 01-15-21
voice acting really bad
The content of the book was good, but the voice acting was condescending and without range.
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- Robert Evans
- 11-10-20
Progressively horrible.
He starts out with an academic approach to content which is very informative. As he progresses and uses black accents I found it insulting. These attempts at “Ebonics” were unnecessary and totally inaccurate. He seemed to relish in using this style of talk and it did not differentiate no matter the black person he was quoting. Horrible.
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