Volume 38, Number 7 · April 11, 1991
Native Sons
By Arthur Kempton
The Cocaine Kids: The Inside Story of a Teenage Drug Ring
by Terry Williams
Addison-Wesley, 140 pp., $16.95
Raw Recruits
by Alexander Wolff, by Armen Keteyian
Pocket Books, 274 pp., $5.95 (paper)
The Source: The Rap Music Decade, 1980–1990
edited by Jonathan Shecter, edited by David Mays
$1.95
The Cocaine Kids begins this way, with a description whose promise is as glib and as false, in the end, as the transient glow of cocaine intoxication that suffuses it. The scene is the snapshot by which all its participants would want to be remembered. It would capture a romantic vision of themselves, a souvenir of a golden hour when they were 'living large.' It promises a kind of adventure. But Terry Williams has studied the child laborers of the cocaine industry in the Bronx too well to pretend to find anything exotic in their lives. We can better appreciate both his intentions and his discoveries if we take his opening tableau as documenting only the play rituals of a caste of adolescents so inured to being denied the substance of what they have been told they want that they consume their lives chasing after its shadows.
Review, 8969 words
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