Street Poison
The Biography of Iceberg Slim
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Narrated by:
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J. D. Jackson
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By:
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Justin Gifford
About this listen
From a career as a, yes, ruthless pimp in the '40s and '50s, Iceberg Slim refashioned himself as the first and still the greatest of the "street lit" masters, whose vivid books have made him an icon to such rappers as Ice-T, Jay-Z, and Snoop Dogg and a presiding spirit of "blaxploitation" culture.
You can't understand contemporary Black (and even American) culture without reckoning with Iceberg Slim and his many acolytes and imitators. Literature professor Justin Gifford has been researching the life and work of Robert Beck for a decade, culminating in Street Poison, a colorful and compassionate biography of one of the most complicated figures in 20th-century literature. Drawing on a wealth of archival material - including FBI files; prison records; and interviews with Beck, his wife, and his daughters, Gifford explores the sexual trauma and racial violence Beck endured that led to his reinvention as Iceberg Slim, one of America's most infamous pimps of the 1940s and '50s.
From pimping to penning his profoundly influential confessional autobiography, Pimp, to his involvement in radical politics, Gifford's biography illuminates the life and works of one of American literature's most unique renegades.
©2015 Original Material © 2015 by Justin Gifford. Recorded by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
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Delusion shattering
- By Matthew A. Burnett on 06-12-20
By: Jesmyn Ward
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Season of the Witch
- Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love
- By: David Talbot
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 16 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Season of the Witch is the first book to fully capture the dark magic of San Francisco in this breathtaking period, when the city radically changed itself - and then revolutionized the world. The cool gray city of love was the epicenter of the 1960s cultural revolution. But by the early 1970s, San Francisco’s ecstatic experiment came crashing down from its starry heights. The city was rocked by savage murder sprees, mysterious terror campaigns, political assassinations, street riots, and finally a terrifying sexual epidemic.
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Gripping, important history - well told
- By The Companion on 05-21-12
By: David Talbot
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Bop Apocalypse
- Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs
- By: Martin Torgoff
- Narrated by: Roger Wayne
- Length: 13 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Martin Torgoff details the rise of early drug culture in America by weaving together the disparate elements that formed this new segment of the American fabric. Channeling his decades of writing experience, Torgoff connects the birth of jazz in New Orleans, the first drug laws, Louis Armstrong, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, swing, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, the Savoy Ballroom, Charlie Parker, the birth of bebop, the rise of the Beat Generation, and the launch of heroin in Harlem.
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fascinating read
- By Ryan on 06-27-17
By: Martin Torgoff
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Original Gangstas
- The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap
- By: Ben Westhoff
- Narrated by: J.D. Jackson
- Length: 15 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Amid rising gang violence, the crack epidemic, and police brutality, a group of unlikely voices cut through the chaos of late 1980s Los Angeles: N.W.A. Led by a drug dealer, a glammed-up producer, and a high school kid, N.W.A. gave voice to disenfranchised African Americans across the country. And they quickly redefined pop culture across the world. Their names remain as popular as ever: Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube. Dre soon joined forces with Suge Knight to create the combustible Death Row Records.
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Very Informative and well told
- By guyzilla on 02-19-17
By: Ben Westhoff
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Harlem
- The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America
- By: Jonathan Gill
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 19 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Harlem is perhaps the most famous, iconic neighborhood in the United States. A bastion of freedom and the capital of black America, Harlem's 20th-century renaissance changed our arts, culture, and politics forever. But this is only one of the many chapters in a wonderfully rich and varied history. In Harlem, historian Jonathan Gill presents the first complete chronicle of this remarkable place.
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Very Interesting.
- By Joyce Mirowski on 06-05-20
By: Jonathan Gill
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The Ten-Cent Plague
- The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
- By: David Hajdu
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created in the bold, pulpy pages of comic books. The Ten-Cent Plague explores this cultural emergence and its fierce backlash while challenging common notions of the divide between "high" and "low" art.
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Very frightening
- By Paul on 09-24-08
By: David Hajdu
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Girls Like Us
- Fighting for a World Where Girls Are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself
- By: Rachel Lloyd
- Narrated by: Rachel Lloyd
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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During her teens, Rachel Lloyd ended up a victim of commercial sexual exploitation. With time, through incredible resilience, and with the help of a local church community, she finally broke free of her pimp and her past and devoted herself to helping other young girls escape "the life". In Girls Like Us, Lloyd reveals the dark world of commercial sex trafficking in cinematic detail and tells the story of her groundbreaking nonprofit organization: GEMS.
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Rachel Lloyd is an Amazing Woman
- By joan m. on 01-14-22
By: Rachel Lloyd
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High-Risers
- Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing
- By: Ben Austen
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Built in the 1940s atop an infamous Italian slum, Cabrini-Green grew to 23 towers and a population of 20,000 - all of it packed onto just 70 acres a few blocks from Chicago's ritzy Gold Coast. Cabrini-Green became synonymous with crime, squalor, and the failure of government. For the many who lived there, it was also a much-needed resource - it was home. By 2011, every high-rise had been razed, the island of black poverty engulfed by the white affluence around it, the families dispersed.
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Little mention of accountability of the people getting the housing
- By Steve D Renz on 05-15-18
By: Ben Austen
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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
- Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.
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Utterly beautiful!
- By L.A. on 12-27-19
By: Saidiya Hartman
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Beale Street Dynasty
- Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis
- By: Preston Lauterbach
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Following the Civil War, Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, violence and passion. But out of this turmoil emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment. Preston Lauterbach tells this vivid, fascinating story through the multigenerational saga of a family whose ambition, race pride, and moral complexity indelibly shaped the city that would loom so large in American life.
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Narration Speed...It's Half the Battle
- By B. Westman on 03-21-17
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In Our Backyard
- Human Trafficking in America and What We Can Do to Stop It
- By: Nita Belles
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Human trafficking is not just something that happens in other countries. Nor is it something that just happens to "other people," such as runaways or the disenfranchised. Even kids in your own neighborhood can fall victim. But they don't have to.
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A good entry to learning about HT
- By Justicepirate on 12-05-16
By: Nita Belles
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The Real Lolita
- The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World
- By: Sarah Weinman
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved novels ever. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the first time. Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita.
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Meandering and tedious while never delivering the promised story.
- By Timothy McCarthy on 09-15-18
By: Sarah Weinman
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From one of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth century comes the uncensored and gritty novel that inspired today's street lit and hip-hop culture. After my ninth birthday, I began to really understand the meaning of my name. I began to understand just what my mother was doing for a living. There was nothing I could do about it, but even had I been able to, I wouldn't have changed it.
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I have to thank Dave Chapelle for this...
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Love the story
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Imprinted Images In My Mind Forever..
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Trick Baby tells the story of White Folks, a blue-eyed, light-haired con artist whose pale skin allows him to pass in the streets as a white man. Folks is tormented early in life, rejected by other children and branded a "trick baby," a child conceived between a hooker and her trick. Refusing to abandon his life in the ghetto and a chance at revenge, Folks is taken under the wing of an older mentor, Blue. What happens next is unbelievable.
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This was the wrong narrator for the book.
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From one of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth century comes the uncensored and gritty novel that inspired today's street lit and hip-hop culture. After my ninth birthday, I began to really understand the meaning of my name. I began to understand just what my mother was doing for a living. There was nothing I could do about it, but even had I been able to, I wouldn't have changed it.
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A blueprint. A bible. What Sun Tzu’s Art of War was to ancient China, Pimp is to the streets. As real as you can get without jumping in, this is the story of Iceberg Slim’s life as he saw, felt, tasted, and smelled it. It is a trip through hell by the one man who lived to tell the tale—the dangers of jail, addiction, and death that are still all too familiar for today’s Black community. By telling the story of one man’s struggles and triumphs in an underground world, Pimp shows us the game doesn’t change; it just has a different swagger.
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I have to thank Dave Chapelle for this...
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Love the story
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Imprinted Images In My Mind Forever..
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- By: Iceberg Slim
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This was the wrong narrator for the book.
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What listeners say about Street Poison
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- l howard
- 05-23-19
the true iceberg
excellent narrative of a complex man. real defined his character and the conflicts within his life.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-17-19
Whoa
This is a very well written story. It is very difficult to listen to at times, but if you can make it to the end it is very well worth the uncomfortable feelings you will encounter. The historical concept in the realisation of a man who has lived a hard life all come full circle.
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- Emanuel McCown III
- 08-27-15
Great book!
I thoroughly enjoyed this book about Iceberg Slim. Justin Gifford gives a balanced portrait of Iceberg Slim's life and does a brilliant job of painting a picture of the times in which he lived.
The book is especially good because it is not a re-telling of "Pimp". The book discusses Iceberg Slim's pimping career without recounting a lot of pimping stories. The author also looks at Iceberg Slim's entire criminal career.
Iceberg Slim's life after crime is as fascinating and the author does a great job of recounting it.
The narrator was very good as well. A bad narrator can distract from a story, but this narrator was good.
I highly recommend this book.
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3 people found this helpful
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- JMKIII58
- 09-15-16
A must read for all Robert Beck fans.
Read this autobiography of Robert Beck, only after you have read his collection of material. This book gives you his life from child to his death in 1992. His writing of his life as a pimp still has influence today.
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- Stevo
- 10-13-17
Alternate perspective on Slim's Pimp
Justin Griffin, an academic, has gone over the life story of Robert Beck aka Iceberg Slim and done a fact-check on him. And surprisingly, it is mostly true.
This book ads texture to 'Pimp: The Story of my Life'. Iceberg Slims book is so immediate and speaks so well to our human condition that it feels when reading it, like it is very contemporary. Like it could be today. Or maybe all set in the 70's like 'Superfly', even though you know its a bit earlier than that.
For example, in Iceberg Slims book, when The Runt is continually playing on the record player Lady Day crooning about how her man don't love her and treats her awful mean, we all know she's listening to Billy Holiday's 'Fine and Mellow'. Its old, but we still listen to old recordings of it today. Maybe it was old when The Runt was listening to it too. And what year was it from, anyway? The late 1950's? (Turns out it is from 1939)
Justin Griffins book puts the whole story into context by talking about the state of the different cities and what was going on in America during the time that the whole story goes down. And it is early after the end of slavery and the great migration as African American communities were still defining themselves. America changed over the course of Iceberg Slims life, and this is a good way of telling that story of the evolving African American condition.
Griffin digs up old school reports, arrest reports, prison admissions, prison psychology reports to corroborate and disprove the stories told in Pimp. He tells you the real stories of his parents, where they lived, what they did, when they moved from Tennessee, the exact addresses they lived in every step along the way. You can look it up on Google Maps and Google Street View as you go through the book. His stepfather Henry Upshaw is a real person, and the book not only tells the story of his business and how it grew to multiple locations, and the civic clubs Henry and 'Bergs mother were involved in, but also, it turns out, he did not die of a broken heart when he was abandoned, but remarried and we get treated to learn what happened to him as he remarried and finished his life without them.
Interestingly, Iceberg Slim was married for a short time to 'No Thumbs' the thief that was only a minor character in 'Pimp', and Griffin tracked down her prison records and we also follow her story through her continued rap sheet, prison stints and prison psychologist reports after Iceberg Slim and her parted ways which does serve in some ways to introduce the voice of one of his whores.
The story of Robert Beck did not finish with him giving up pimping like in his autobiography, and Griffin follows his life through to his death having interviewed his post-Pimp wives and daughters and other people that knew him.
His post Pimp life, and ability or lack thereof to run square relationships with his former pimping getting in the way of intimacy is illuminating.
If you are a fan of Iceberg Slim, this is a absolutely a good fun book. Spend a credit. Give it a listen.
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