“My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen-years-old... The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand…
I lost people I loved, was betrayed by people I trusted, felt the breeze of bullets flying by my head… I went dead broke and got hood rich on those streets. I hated it. I was addicted to it. It nearly killed me.
It was the site of my moral education, as strange as that may sound. It’s my core story, and… that core story is the one that I have to tell.” - Excerpted from the Introduction (pg. 18)

Shawn Corey Carter, aka Jay-Z, wasn’t always a cultural icon married to Beyonce’ who had parlayed his success as a rap artist into a multi-millionaire empire with a host of diverse holdings ranging from a record label to a music publishing company to a clothing line to a nightclub chain to an NBA team. No, he spent his formative years in the Marcy Housing Projects in Bed-Stuy, before moving to Trenton where he dropped out of school to sell crack on the streets while pursuing a hip-hop career.

“I began life as the child of a mixed-race marriage growing up in a white suburb, treated sometimes as a creature of bad circumstance… Bad things happen until good people get in the way.

I learned this life lesson growing up in Smithtown, Long Island, and I see it almost everywhere I go in pursuit of the next big story… My immigrant parents made sure I had the potential to capture my American dream anyway.

I was handed a life of possibilities. That experience left me with the urge to chart how those around us get their chance at life and whether they go on to share their good fortune with others when the time comes.”
-- Excerpted from the Introduction (pg. 4)

“Thoughtlessness is the new manners, and I’ve got to say I don’t like it… Somehow, so many little pieces of courtesy have gone by the wayside. People in your face, in your business, not caring if they are being disrespectfully loud…

So over the last year there were days when I remembered to write things down that struck me. Many are written here. They cover the map of my mind, unleashed on you the way they appear in my head.
Little things, the way I can comment on them in a book but not on TV. In no particular order—oh, and I don’t necessarily have any answers guaranteed to work for anyone.
-- Excerpted from The Foreword (pgs. xiii-xiv)

All over the country nowadays, we’re witnessing a frightening decline in civility, whether it’s teens being bullied to the point of suicide, tourists being subjected to searches at airports that look more like foreplay than pat downs, or simply people talking loudly on cell phones in places where it’s rude or illegal to do so. In the political realm, we’ve heard mudslinging candidates refer to opponents as a “witch,” “whore” or “degenerate idiot,” a Republican interrupt the President’s State of the Union speech to call him a liar, and even a fellow Democrat tell Obama to “shove it.”

“There are many possible interpretations of what it means to create dangerously, and Albert Camus… suggests that it is creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience as a directive…

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is always what I’ve thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

Coming from where I come from, with the history I have—having spent the first twelve years of my life under both dictatorships of Papa Doc and his son, Jean-Claude—this is what I’ve always seen as the unifying principle among all writers."
-- Excerpted from Chapter One (pgs. 10-11)