Growing up with MTV and late 90’s to early 2000’s Rap, Hip-Hop, Pop and Country music, Fat Joe is a musician that is someone that my generation knows very well. From his hits What’s Luv?, Lean Back to recently All the way Up, Fat Joe has been making classics since I was a pre-teen.
- By: Fat Joe, Shaheem Reid
- Narrated by: Fat Joe
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Click here to listen to The Book of Jose A Memoir
I love it when an author narrate’s their own book, and Fat Joe just did it. He has a distinct voice and dialect. So it only makes sense that he narrate’s his own story in his audio book, The Book of Jose: A Memoir.
Whether you are in to hip-hop or not, this book does actually offer valuable lessons if you allow it. One thing that stuck with me, is Fat Joe learning from his parents to not Drink, Smoke and Gamble, and then one of his friends gets rich from learning from Joe’s mistakes.
There’s also some somber parts of the book that really make you grateful for friends and family that are always there for you.
Publisher’s Summary
(from Audible) – The Book of Jose A Memoir
Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum-selling artist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Fat Joe pulls back the curtain on his larger-than-life persona in this gritty, intimate memoir about growing up in the South Bronx and finding his voice through music.
Fat Joe is a hip-hop legend, but this is not a tale of celebrity; it is the story of Joseph Cartagena, a kid who came of age in the South Bronx during its darkest years of drugs, violence, and abandonment, and how he navigated that traumatizing landscape until he found—through art, friendship, luck, and will—a rocky path to a different life.
Joe is born into a sprawling Puerto Rican and Cuban family in the projects of the South Bronx. From infancy his life is threatened by violence, and by the time he starts middle school, he is faced with the grim choice that defined a generation: to become predator or prey. Soon Joe and his crew dominate the streets, but he finds his true love among the park jams where the Bronx’s wild energy takes musical form. His identity splits in two: a hustler roaming record stores, looking for beats; and a budding rapper whose violent rep rings in the streets. As Joe’s day-to-day life becomes more fraught with betrayal, addiction, and death, until he himself is shot and almost killed, he gravitates toward the music that gives him both a voice to tell the stories of his young life and the tools he needs to create a new one. The challenges never stop—but neither does Joe.
This memoir, written in Joe’s own intensely compelling voice, moves with the momentum of pulp fiction, but underneath the tragicomedy and riveting tales of the streets and the industry is a thought-provoking story about a generation of survivors raised in warlike conditions—the life-and-death choices they had to make, the friends they lost and mourned, and the glittering lives they created from the ruins.
©2022 Fat Joe and Shaheem Reid (P)2022 Random House Audio
