Life Is Hot in Cracktown

By Buddy Giovinazzo

With echoes of Richard Price's Clockers, Life is Hot in Cracktown paints a realistic and disturbing picture of life on the edge in New York's drug-infested neighborhoods. It's a world of drug addicts,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560250542
• ISBN13: 9781560250548
• Release Date: April 1993
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 1.0" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

years ahead of time

1993 and the city doesn't really want to know they're in the peak of a crack epedemic. Giovinazzo tells it all with all the "in your face" brutality and dirt that New York wanted to keep confined to the Port Authority Buiding and 42nd st. before it turned to Disneyland. You know what? It's all still there, just spread around more. Disturbing and straight from the hip,but it wasn't till years past that those very images have come to permeate our music ,literature, art and films. Take a ride on the crack train and while you're at it check out BG's outstanding film work like No Way Home with Tim Roth. A local guy who is a Euro cult star and fabulous drummer as well as director. I need another hit of Buddy G

Excellent Collection of Contemporary Themes

I was first interested in "Life is Hot in Cracktown" after hearing it was the new sequel if you will to Selby's "Last Exit to Brooklyn." While Last Exit is a classic, this book is fast-paced, contemporary, and ambitious. This string of distantly realted stories exemplifies the horror the criminal underworld and idolizes the good people caught the system. Some characters are good, some are bad unlike Selby's books in which all are truly wicked. I suggest you read this. Throughout the reading, you will feel a sense of hope pervading the most horrible of situation. Good look and enjoy.

Wow

Well, these vignettes are eerie, well written, and intense! He has a way of keeping you reading! Giovanazzo's other books are similar...and just as well written.

astonishing, powerful, truthful, real

Giovanazzo has trained his magnificent eye on the lives of some of New York's trash heap. The prose style is clean and unpretentious, and the portraits are sometimes touching, sometimes horrifying, but always real.

CONFUSION ON BLASTOFF STREET

This book will make you think, and feel. Its characters are complex people. But what makes their lives so tragic is their direct or indirect involvement with the homogenizing grind of crack addiction. As this currency and the pursuit of it control varying, but always overwelming amounts of the characters' time and energy, we see them stripped of all human traits except pain. And this, in action and ideation, is the sad fate of the addict. Superb, truthful book.