Useful Tips
- Tip 1: Once you have located a book on your topic click on the subject headings of the catalog record. This can lead you to additional books on the same topic.
- Tip 2: Look to see if the catalog record has a summary or table of contents of the book and is available in other editions.
- Tip 3: If a record says networked resource it is usually available online.
- Tip 4: When doing keyword searching, try combining keywords/phrases. Be aware of the differences between broad and narrower, search:
Selected Books
- Born in the Bronx: A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop byCall Number: Africana Library F128.68.B8 B67 2007Writer and curator Johan Kugelberg has pulled together the scattered remains of a movement that never had its eye on posterity. The book includes a foreword by legendary DJ and Bronx activist Afrika Bambaataa, a hip hop timeline by best-selling author Jeff Chang, the improvisational flyer artwork of Buddy Esquire, Polaroid photographs buried for decades in basements across the Bronx, and personal contributions from influential figures such as Grandmaster Cas, LA Sunshine, JDL, Mare 139, and Grandwizzard Theodore. Hip hop map of the Bronx on inside of dust jacket.
- Yes, Yes Y'all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip Hop’s First Decade byCall Number: Africana Library ML3531 .F75x 2002A brilliantly different, sweeping, and stylish history of the other superpower of the twentieth century, written by a "superb narrator of the twentieth-century European story"-Washington Times "Fascinating and immensely readable" is the way one British newspaper described A History in Fragments. With the rise of the European superpower-symbolized by the introduction of the euro on January 1, 2002-Europe has gained a new prominence on the world stage. But if you think that, in a changing world order, Europe is one area that we Americans have a grasp of-think again. The great stories of the century-the two world wars, the rise and fall of Nazism and Communism- are self-evident in their importance. But behind the politics and the ideologies lies another history: the history of forces that shaped the lives of individual Europeans and the lives of men and women around the world. These are stories not only of politics and military movements, but also of culture, religion, sex, and demographics, related here with an unmatched eye for the telling detail and spiced with memorable anecdotes. As the U.K.'s prestigious Sunday Telegraph put it: "Vinen moves effortlessly from social and economic issues to politics, from ideology to military history The writing is lively, the enthusiasm infectious, and the gift for bold, epigrammatic summary genuinely impressive."
- Gunshots in My Cook-up: Bits and Bites from a Hip Hop Caribbean Life byCall Number: Africana Library ML3531 .H588x 2002Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, noted music journalist and former editor-in-chief of The Source, brings us Gunshots in My Cook-Up. It's an extraordinary memoir that focuses on hip-hop culture -- its American existence, its international appeal, and more intimately, its affect on the author's life. Hinds chronicles this long and bumpy relationship that began the moment his nine-year-old eyes and ears drank in "Rapper's Delight" in Guyana, and continued with his eventual migration to Brooklyn as a teenager, on through his adult role as a player and pundit in our present culture of hip-hop primacy. The lively narrative presents a host of moving portraits of life in the hip-hop trenches. It opens an un-precedented window on the pain and beauty in being five-time Grammy award-winner Lauryn Hill; the pensive, controlling tendencies of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs; the vulnerabilities underlying Dr. Dre's gangster-for-life exterior; the runaway creative energy of the gifted songwriter Wyclef Jean; the perpetual drive of Russell Simmons; and much more. Through the intimate interviews and recollections of the celebrities that pepper the narrative, alongside deeply affecting, personal musings, Hinds traces the heights and depths of his hip-hop love affair. He takes the reader on a vivid exploration: a murky nightclub in the violent streets of late-eighties Brooklyn; the campus of an Ivy League university caught up in the throes of political rap during the early nineties; a curbside in Los Angeles where the Notorious B.I.G. has just been shot; the achingly poor streets of Port-au-Prince Haiti, as a sea of black humanity surges to touch a hip-hop native son; and within the churning of his own mind as he struggles to make sense of a love that drifts all too often to ambivalence, even hate.
- Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur byCall Number: Africana Library ML420.S517 D99 2001Michael Eric Dyson analyzes the life of rapper/actor Tupac Amaru Shakur (1971-96) as a microcosm of black American life and culture. Placing gangsta rap in social and historical context, he thoroughly and thoughtfully considers its key elements as evidenced by Shakur's music and videos, exploring issues like machismo, the simultaneous contempt for and adoration of black women, and black-on-black violence. (Shakur himself was shot to death in a still-unsolved murder.) Dyson discusses these sensitive, controversial subjects with such noted cultural analysts as Khephra Burns and Stanley Crouch, creditably balancing the opinions of rap's supporters, rap's critics, and rappers themselves.
- Westside: The Coast-to-Coast Explosion of Hip Hop byCall Number: Africana Library F869.L89 N4 2000Journalist William Shaw chronicles the lives of seven young men in Southcentral Los Angeles as they struggle for success in the hip hop music industry. Shaw reveals that the world these men inhabit is one of few opportunities and frequent violence, yet it is a world unlike the wasteland often depicted in the rap lyrics that have made it famous. Among the men Shaw meets are Khop, a former honor student who finds fame working with rap star Ice Cube; Rah, who loses his friend and fellow rapper in a shooting; energetic talent-show regular Big Al, dropped by his label after his first album flops, and other surprising and ambitious men facing uncertain futures. In Westside, Shaw also tells of his meetings with Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and Bronx hip hop pioneer Kool Herc, examines the life and career of N.W.A.'s Eazy-E, and witnesses a performance by a then-unknown (and penniless) Eminem.
- Westsiders: Young Men and Hip Hop in L.A. byCall Number: Olin Library F869.L89 N4x 2000"From author and journalist William Shaw comes this probing exploration of the dreams and the realities of seven young African-American men struggling to make it in Southcentral Los Angeles, the world capital of gangsta rap and West Coast hip hop." "In the late eighties, hip hop was revolutionized by the hard new sound that exploded from Los Angeles. The exhilarating and shocking new music described a place where guns, sex, and life are cheap and disposable and where the struggle for success, stability, and respect is hard fought. The seven young subjects of this chronicle have all grown up in a neighborhood riddled with violence where the notion of manhood seems constantly under threat - and all of them dream of transforming this urban experience into the platinum success enjoyed by their heroes, rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg, and Dr. Dre. The sometimes troubled products of a ruthless environment, they look to hip hop as their only viable form of expression, as their key to survival, and as their greatest hope for escape."