Pimp, Iceberg Slim
Pimp, Iceberg Slim
16 Rating(s)
List: $20.95 | Sale: $14.66
Club: $10.47

Pimp
The Story of My Life

Author: Iceberg Slim

Narrator: Cary Hite

Unabridged: 11 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/10/2011

Synopsis

A blueprint. A bible. What Sun Tzu’s Art of War was to ancient China, Pimp is to the streets. As real as you can get without jumping in, this is the story of Iceberg Slim’s life as he saw, felt, tasted, and smelled it. It is a trip through hell by the one man who lived to tell the tale—the dangers of jail, addiction, and death that are still all too familiar for today’s black community. By telling the story of one man’s struggles and triumphs in an underground world, Pimp shows us the game doesn’t change; it just has a different swagger.Only Slim could tell this story and make the reader feel it. If you thought Hustle & Flow was the true pimp story, this book is where it all began. This is the heyday of the pimp, the hard-won pride and glory, small though it may be; the beginnings of pimp before it was dragged in front of the camera, before pimp juice and pimp style. Though it is a tale of his times, it will remain current and true for as long as there is a race bias, as long as there is a street life, as long as there is exploitation.

About Iceberg Slim

Iceberg Slim  (1918–1992), a.k.a. Robert Beck, was born in Chicago and initiated into the life of the pimp at age eighteen. He briefly attended the Tuskegee Institute but dropped out to return to the streets of the South Side, where he remained, pimping, until he was forty-two. After several stints in jail, culminating in a ten-month stay in Cook County, he decided to give up the life and turned to writing. With a family to feed, he folded his life into the pages of Pimp, which emerged as a definitive chronicle of street life. Slim was catapulted into the public eye as a new American hero, known for speaking the truth whether that truth was ugly, sexy, rude, or blunt. He published six more books based on his life and different aspects of the ghetto black, pimp community. Slim died at age seventy-three in 1992, one day before the Los Angeles riots.

About Cary Hite

Cary Hite has performed in several theaters across the country as a cast member in the longest-running African American play in history, The Diary of Black Men. He also appeared in Edward II, Fences, Macbeth, Good Boys, Side Effects May Vary, and the indie feature The City Is Mine. He has voiced several projects for AudibleKids, including Souls Look Back in Wonder, From Slave Ship to Freedom Road, and Papa, Do You Love Me?

Reviews

Goodreads review by Greg on December 07, 2008

I bought this as an impulse purchase because it was displayed right next to the cash register at Shakespeare & Co. I'd seen it in the AK Press catalog before, and that is probably what made me pick it up. Pimp is entertaining in a kind of trashy way. It's a biography about a part of life that many m......more

Goodreads review by Sasha on August 16, 2016

Iceberg Slim didn't invent the great American pimp archetype in 1969 but he codified it, he exposed it to mass culture, so he's an influential writer. Everything from Slick Rick to blaxploitation to the pathetic "pickup artist" scene owes a debt to him. So when Robin Kelley writes for the New Yorker......more

Goodreads review by Book Clubbed on December 26, 2021

Goddamn, this shit so raw I caught salmonella. This is acute American capitalism (perhaps embellished) at its finest. This shit makes the Merrill Lynch CEO look like a socialist who tucks his long underwear into his socks.......more

Goodreads review by Trish on February 04, 2018

The thing about Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck, the reason he is so magnetic, is that he is actually not the “Iceberg” he pretended to be. In this memoir of his life on the streets, he revels in his successes but also agonizes over his failures. He seems to tell us straight: this worked, that didn’t. He......more

Goodreads review by Meike on April 20, 2022

Okay, so I think we don't have to discuss that the exploits that Iceberg describes in his autobiographical novel are, you know, immoral, to say the least (lying to women and gaslighting them, severe physical and mental abuse, hooking them on drugs, taking all their money, throwing them away when the......more

Quotes

“The best-known pimp of our time.” Washington Post

“Pimp is an eye-boggling netherworld documentary, a tear-arse tale of ferocious emotion, expressed through action.” Q

“One of the greatest black writers in American history.” Ice-T

“Iceberg Slim was the godfather of a genre.” K’wan, #1 Essence bestselling author

Awards

  • Book Riot Pick
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