The Book of Jose

Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum-selling artist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Fat Joe pulls back the curtain on his larger-than-life persona in this gritty, intimate memoir about growing up in the South Bronx and finding his voice through music.

Fat Joe is a hip-hop legend, but this is not a tale of celebrity; it is the story of Joseph Cartagena, a kid who came of age in the South Bronx during its darkest years of drugs, violence, and abandonment, and how he navigated that traumatizing landscape until he found—through art, friendship, luck, and will—a rocky path to a different life.

Joe was born into a sprawling Puerto Rican and Cuban family in the projects of the South Bronx. From infancy his life is threatened by violence, and by the time he starts middle school, he is forced to make a life-shaping choice: to be prey or predator. Soon, Joe and his crew rise up to dominate the streets—dodging bullets and betrayal all along the way—but he discovers his true strength in the street corner ciphers where the Bronx’s wild energy took musical form. His identity splits in two: a hustler roaming record stores, looking for beats; a budding rapper whose rep rings in the streets. As his day-to-day life becomes more and more fraught—he is shot and almost killed and watches as family and friends fall to prison, addiction, and even death—he gravitates toward the music that gives him both a voice to tell the stories of his young life and the tools he needs to create a new one. The challenges never stopped—but neither did Joe.

This memoir, written in Joe’s own intensely compelling voice, moves with the momentum of pulp fiction, but underneath the tragicomedy and riveting tales of the streets and the industry is a thought-provoking story about a generation of survivors raised in warlike conditions—the life-and-death choices they had to make, the friends they lost and mourned, the regrets that haunted them, and the enduring art and glittering lives they created from the ruins.

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