Book Review -- The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir by D. Watkins - Entrepreneur Generations

I've been really using my Audible subscription this summer, and was able to hear D. Watkins' new memoir The Cook Up: A Crock Rock Memoir, read by the author, this week. D. Watkins came into prominence over the last couple of years, when an essay he wrote called "To Poor for Pop Culture"  was shared all over social media; this led to the release of a collection of essays called The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America, which was a terrific collection of essays, but, more significantly, whereas The Fire Next Time helped form the backdrop of the March on Washington, so this collection helped cement our understanding of Freddie Gray and the Baltimore uprising.

In this full-length memoir, Watkins presents a gritty coming-of-age tale that begins dramatically and tragically, with the murder of his brother Bip, who was a kingpin of sorts in the drug business of their East Baltimore neighborhood. Bip wanted his younger brother to escape from the drug business, encouraging D. with knowledge of black leaders and pushing him to do well in school and the SAT, but Bip's murder -- after a brief jaunt at college -- eventually pushes the author into the drug trade business. Eventually, after huge successes initially, he sees his friends either locked up or gunned down, and soon finds his calling as a bar owner, and then a writer.

Watkins' memoir reveals a side to Baltimore that The Wire only touched on: the story of a young man dealing with the pain and trauma of the death of his older brother, and how this compels him to become the drug manufacturer and dealer that his brother was but never wanted him to be.  Watkins' voice is authentic, as are all the details: we learn almost exactly how to make crack, what ingredients to add to make its high as intense as it can be; we learn about how to run a drug operation without getting caught, how to run a professional operation that kept the block litter-free and church coffers full; we learn about how turf wars are fought and what it's like to look at your friend dying on the street in front of you.

It's this authenticity that make The Cook Up a remarkable story, an unconventional bildungsroman that sees a young man go from innocence to experience and live to tell the story with some reflection years after.  It's also a story of redemption, as the author makes a series of tough choices in order to go back to college and escape the inevitable death or conviction that would have happened if he had stayed in the drug game on Madeira Street.  The memoir is often vivid and poetic, and the opening pages detailing Bip's death resonated in my gut and heart as I listened to Watkins reading them. Later, I loved the characterization of Miss Angie, the matriarch of Madeira Street, who cooked and cared for all the young men, and of Soni, the Afrocentric young woman who the author falls in love with -- among others. 

My initial thoughts about The Cook Up, which I found to be powerful and often funny, is that it should probably be read by every new teacher coming into Baltimore or any other big city. The insight it offers into the streets and the drug culture from which many of our students come is invaluable to tackle some of the challenges that our students have. Watkins is writing about a world that is only a dozen blocks or so from my house, and it's a world that is so different than my northeast Baltimore landscape, and is able to elucidate the "two Baltimores" with insights I'd never heard before. 

As a sustained memoir, I found The Cook UP to be bogged down in trivial (to me) details sometimes, such as a lengthy description of car-shopping. And the memoir's ending felt a little bit quick for me; I wanted to hear more about how Watkins' transformation occurred; I also didn't feel like the the language, so poetic at the beginning, sustained its power as the memoir progressed and concluded.

However, these are quibbles; for a second book (and first full-length memoir), The Cook Up is both moving and important. Watkins' anger, despair, and wisdom about race, segregation, drugs, and the problems of our American cities is palpable, and I would love it if I saw some of my students reading this book in the future.

That being said, The Cook Up offers a dilemma for educators like me: as a coming of age story, I'm certain my students could benefit from reading about the transformation that Watkins undergoes. But with vivid descriptions about cooking crack, about exactly what taking Percocet feels like, of extreme violence, it would be a difficult book to formally, or even informally, teach in a school setting. I've met D. Watkins a couple of times, and read and enjoyed his collection of essays The Beast Side, which our school taught to Juniors this year. Mr. Watkins visited and talked with our students, who were enthralled by his charismatic and honest presence. The Cook Up seems like a tougher sell to schools, because there is no picking and choosing essays from a collection, as we need to hear the gritty details in order to understand the power of his transformation. It's a tough dilemma, with no easy answers, but I know I can't wait for Watkins' next book.

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/29y8hXe Book Review -- The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir by D. Watkins - Entrepreneur Generations

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