A rebellious boy’s journey through the wilds of urban America and the shrapnel of a self-destructing family—this is the riveting story of a generation told through one dazzlingly poetic new voice. MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: a mother who led the new nation’s dance company and a father who would soon become a revered pioneer in black studies. But things fell apart and a decade later MK was in America a teenager lost in a fog of drugs sex and violence on the streets of North Philadelphia. Now he was alone—his mother in a mental hospital his father gone his older brother locked up in a prison on the other side of the country—and forced to find his own way to survive physically mentally and spiritually by any means necessary. Buck is a powerful memoir of how a precocious kid educated himself through the most unconventional teachers—outlaws and eccentrics rappers and mystic strangers ghetto philosophers and strippers and eventually an alternative school that transformed his life with a single blank sheet of paper. It’s a one-of-a-kind story about finding your purpose in life and an inspiring tribute to the power of education art and love to heal and redeem us.