The Basketball Diaries: The Classic about Growing Up Hip on New York's Mean Streets

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He critiques everything from the Catholic school he attends to the cops arresting dealers and profiting from the drugs they put back into the market. At seventeen, Momaday attended ­military school in Virginia for a year, and he then enrolled at the ­University of New Mexico, where he met his first wife, Gaye Mangold, the mother of three of his four daughters. This diary gives insight into the self-serving life of a guy with authority issues, and while may have been considered groundbreaking, is an affront to people not given the opportunities Carroll had. On one occasion, Carroll breaks up with his older lover when she tries to initiate sex with him while he is strung out from a heroin withdrawal and waiting for a friend to bring him his fix. However, some critics wondered how much the diaries were edited before publication, especially since the book includes many outrageous incidents.

S. government began a policy of backing smaller foreign countries that were in danger of being overthrown by Soviet-backed groups. These include Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems of Jim Carroll (1993) and Void of Course: Poems 1994-1997 (1998). Then I swam to shore to meet the others and we turned, pulled down our shorts and flashed our moons to the old sightseeing buggers as the boat pulled away and headed for the Hudson. Momaday is a big man with a wry sense of humor, his large frame matching his deep and sonorous voice. He got himself hooked on heroin and other drugs, skipped school (where he was lucky enough to be on scholarship), frequently committed robbery, burglary, armed robbery and burglary, trespassing, assault, and ended up arrested a few times and in jail at Rikers.States had been supporting South Vietnam for decades in its conflict against Ho Chi Minh's communist forces in North Vietnam. We take intellectual property concerns very seriously, but many of these problems can be resolved directly by the parties involved. After the publication of his first two poetry collections, Organic Trains (1967) and Four Ups and One Down (1970), Carroll's poetry was relatively unknown outside underground circles. Pimps and prostitutes and transvestites and junkies and businessmen and children and you-name-it all blended together and somehow figured out a way to live a somewhat harmonious existence in this concrete jungle.

I'm really fascinated by my own adolescent fascination with substance abuse and general nihilistic fucked-uppedness, which is something I've finally realized not everyone has, and which I have only fairly recently -- and okay, not completely -- grown out of. Sometimes these memories are shrouded in the fog of time; sometimes these memories have been tinkered with and are no longer a memory of what happened as they are a memory of what has been reconstructed. Jim Carroll's early teens growing up in nineteen-sixties' Manhattan were W-A-Y different from mine spent in suburbia a decade later. I will add as a post-script that "People Who Died" is one of my all-time favorite running songs, and arguably one of the best of ALL songs. For example, these passages are supposedly Carroll's authentic (although edited) teenage diary transcripts.I'm gonna bring all the dirt heads from old Madison Square Boy's Club up here some night: they'll freak out in one second. Given the current declawed condition that NYC finds itself in this book pulses with the long lost true grit that epitomized the city seen through the wild drug-addled eyes of youth. You totally don't believe in Hep C when you're a kid, and maybe you do believe in dying from an overdose, but more, again, for its ability to immortalize you and make your band cool forever, not as a literal thing. He even uses some of the 60s cant to justify it all ("the real junkie should be raised up for saying fuck you to all this shit city jive, for going on with all the risks and hassles and con. Bound in publisher's wraps with black and white author photo on the front cover taken by Rosemary Klemfuss.

As the leader of The Jim Carroll Band he released three albums as well as several spoken word recordings. According to him, EVERYONE, from priests to teachers to women on the subway, either wants to do him harm or have sex with him. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. On the coffee table sits a bronze sculpture of the Wyoming rock formation known as Devils Tower, with a bear at its base; as an infant, ­Momaday was taken to this sacred site and given his Kiowa name, Tsoai-talee, or “Rock-Tree Boy,” after the story of a boy who turned into a bear, chasing his sisters up the “rock-tree” and into the stars. Join us for intimate conversations with Sharon Olds and Olga Tokarczuk; fiction by Rivers Solomon, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Zach Williams; poems by Terrance Hayes and Maggie Millner; nonfiction by Robert Glück, Jean Garnett, and Sean Thor Conroe; and performances by George Takei, Lena Waithe, and many others.Just as the boat is pulling out of the dock, Tony takes out a bottle of CARBONA cleaning fluid and a few rags and suggests that we do a little sniffing to get high. Before there was a “cop on every corner” in New York, there were some of the most interesting characters frolicking around, bounding up and down the streets as if they were players in a real-life version of a very fucked up Wonderland. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. I pictured myself paddling across a river with black water, only the canoe was going backwards instead of forwards, with clouds that were faces laughing spooky fun house laughs which wouldn’t stop echoing. I loved this book because I have always loved a well-written diary that tells a story, that rips your heart out.

The book ends with him still addicted, still only 16, nodding off in a filthy shooting gallery, wondering what he did to himself.During these years, he chronicled his experiences, and the result is a diary of unparalleled candor that conveys his alternately hilarious and terrifying teenage existence.