

Mama Black Widow
Author: Iceberg Slim
Narrator: Bobby Spears Jr.
Unabridged: 8 hr 3 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Urban Audiobooks
Published: 08/01/2014
Categories: Fiction, Urban, African American & Black Fiction
Author: Iceberg Slim
Narrator: Bobby Spears Jr.
Unabridged: 8 hr 3 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Urban Audiobooks
Published: 08/01/2014
Categories: Fiction, Urban, African American & Black Fiction
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.
Bobby Spears Jr. is a multimedia personality whose career has spanned the arenas of radio, theater, and the World Wide Web. In translating his distinctive brand to the mainstream, he has perfected the unique ability to captivate wider, more diverse audiences without compromising authenticity. Bobby holds a BA in communications from Howard University and is currently a radio personality on WURD Radio.
This is a tough book to read but once you get through the first chapter and enter Otis' life you will find this a hard book to put down. Iceberg Slim provides a window into the life of a Black family that like so many others at that time joined the migration to the 'promised land', the North. They s......more
I'm going through my old list of ten favorite novels, and this was near the top. It's actually the first one I loved as much now as I did 15-20 years ago, but I'm only giving it four stars. There are a few stretches that drag, such as Otis' transformation into a queen, and others that go by a bit to......more
I'm coming down the home stretch of reading everything Iceberg Slim wrote, and I'm glad this one was saved for the endgame. I think I have one or two more left, and then I'm done. Like most of Slim's work, very few punches are pulled. As a matter of fact, I can't think of a single instance of Slim pu......more
It is amazing to me that Iceberg Slim is not more well known in the American mainstream press or even in schools. "Mama Black Widow" is probably one of the great American novels of the 20th Century. If this was going to be a film, only someone like Fassbinder could have filmed it. Also his "Pimp" sh......more
“Remarkable…It ain’t pretty, but Slim’s bracing ghetto melodrama and famously histrionic voice capture a core of unsentimental truth not just about homosexuality in the ghetto but also about the myths and travails of masculinity itself.” Publishers Weekly