NONFICTION: LIFE ADVICE
Super Rich: A Guide to Having It All by Russell Simmons with Chris Morrow
Reviewed by Dan Charnas
The transformation of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons from the recreational drug-using, model-chasing manager of seminal 1980s rap artists Run-DMC, LL Cool J and Will Smith into a serene 21st-century prophet of veganism and meditation may be surreal, but it’s also quite real.
Even in his dark days of excess, Simmons had a lot of light around him. As 1990s entrepreneurs like Suge Knight made the rap business virtually synonymous with invective and violence, Simmons stood above them as a relative paragon of virtue, achieving unmatched success with humor and hustle rather than brutality. As he matured and embraced his holistic lifestyle, Simmons became “Uncle Rush,” purveyor of hip-hop brands but also philanthropist and father-figure.
Simmons takes his mentoring role seriously. In 2007, he wrote his first self-help book, a go-get-’em career primer called “Do You.” Now, he issues his follow-up, “Super Rich,” a slim, succinct and sagacious volume about the true meaning of wealth (spoiler alert: It ain’t about the money).
While Americans easily welcome advice from wealthy men, could anything be more obnoxious than a rich guy telling the aspiring masses, as Simmons does, that “there’s no difference between being broke and being a millionaire”? But Simmons knows this. There’s nothing shameful in enjoying the worldly fruits of your labor, he argues. But it’s the labor, and not its fruits, that brings happiness.
This isn’t some spiritual sleight-of-hand or mystical mumbo jumbo. Simmons may be a multimillionaire, but his real love has never been the dough, it has always been his work, which in his life has always seemed more like the yogic concept of “leela,” or divine play.
In “Super Rich,” the philosophy is sound, articulated in simple prose with assistance from journalist Chris Morrow, but filled with anecdotes, humor and raw language that are unmistakably Simmons.’
Hip-hop and spirituality might seem to have little in common. But like yogic philosophy, hip-hop is all about the power of vibration, the power of the word. In “Super Rich,” Simmons emerges as the first influential voice to make that connection for a new generation.
MYSTERY: GUMSHOE TALE
Kismet by Jakob Arjouni
Reviewed by Richard Lipez
You don’t often run across a hard-boiled literary PI who’s potbellied, recovers from a beating by pigging out on baked beans and complains to a client’s girlfriend that her clothes smell bad when what he’s actually reacting to is the perfume she carefully picked out for the day. Kemal Kayankaya is all that and sometimes worse, and yet this ethnic-Turk-in-Frankfurt moral scourge is as winning a noirish gumshoe as has swooped onto the mystery scene in some time.
In the first of Jakob Arjouni’s four Kayankaya books to be published in the United States — “Happy Birthday, Turk!” will arrive next month — this down-on-his-luck detective is scraping by with just one client, a cheerfully pompous Islamic scholar who likes to explain Turkish culture to a man with it in his own DNA. The professor has hired him to find her missing dog. Then, suddenly, a Brazilian restaurant owner pal of Kayankaya’s is hit by protection racketeers, who rip off his thumb.
Some of Arjouni’s Chandleresque flourishes don’t quite come off, as in, “My face was dripping like lettuce that’s just been washed.” But much of the writing is droll and flavorsome, thanks in part to an especially talented translator, Anthea Bell. The brothel where Kayankaya meets his favorite whore is “as civilized and homely as a village bakery in a French film.” The beer in an Irish pub is dreadful, “but you still drink it to help you put up with the music.”
Sometimes in the background — and occasionally in the foreground — of this hectic, violent tale is the angry sense of alienation felt by Germany’s immigrants. Kayankaya, himself a German citizen, is still known in his neighborhood as that “wog detective.” His Brazilian buddy is regularly humiliated by immigration officials. Until, that is, Kayankaya blackmails the immigration director, a married man with boyfriends who are younger than they ought to be. As with much in Arjouni, this is rough justice solidly in the noir tradition.
NONFICTION: WRITING PRIMER
Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing by Roger Rosenblatt
Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp
Making your living with words has become a precarious profession. The second-biggest bookstore chain in the United States can’t pay its bills. Jobs for journalists are drying up faster than grape juice in a Sham-Wow. So students are fleeing creative-writing courses, right?
Nope. The number of creative-writing programs has increased by 800 percent since 1975, writes Roger Rosenblatt, author of “Unless It Moves the Human Heart.” (The title is florid; the rest of the book is not.) “So here we go again — another writing class. . . . All over America, students ranging in age from their early 20s to their 80s hunker down at seminar tables . . . avid to join a profession that practically guarantees them rejection, poverty and failure.”
For those eager to embark on their own journey of downward mobility, “Unless It Moves the Human Heart” is right up there with Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones,” although less Zen, and Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird,” although less confessional. It takes the form of a memoir that recreates classes in which Rosenblatt and his students tried to answer the question: “Why write?”
Rosenblatt, while acknowledging “the childish romanticism” of the writer, still believes in the craft’s inherent nobility. “I have never known a great writer who did not believe in decency and right action,” he writes, “however earnestly he or his characters strayed from it.”
If it takes an act of faith to want to be a writer, how much more must it require to teach, as Rosenblatt has done for 40 years? The Stony Brook University professor has won an Emmy, a Peabody and two Polk Awards, and his books include fiction and nonfiction best sellers. So he’s more than qualified to teach “Writing Everything,” the course described here.
Rosenblatt believes in thinking big and writing small. “I believe in spare writing. Precise and restrained writing. I like short sentences. Fragmented sentences, sometimes.” His students joke that his course more properly could be called Writing Everything Like Him. As readers of his poignant memoir “Making Toast” (2010) can attest, one could do worse.
Dan Charnas, author of “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop,” is a certified Kundalini Yoga instructor. Richard Lipez writes the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson. Yvonne Zipp reviews books regularly for the Christian Science Monitor.
