Overview

"The Rise and Fall of a Super Freak: And Other True Stories of Black Men Who Made History, is a pocket collection of stories, by award-winning journalist Mike Sager, about American Black men whose lives significantly affected the direction and zeitgeist of American culture. Rick James, known to all as Super Freak, was the first to wear African-inspired braids; his powerful funk beats powered the rollicking 1980s and can still be heard in music today. Sager met music's King of Funk within the thick granite walls of historic Folsom State Prison, where James was serving the final weeks of a sentence for assault, false imprisonment, and furnishing drugs, the result of two separate crack-fueled incidents. After James left prison, the two men remained friends. Eric ""Eazy E"" Wright was a crack dealer who formed, along with icons Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, the seminal rap group Niggas Wit Attitude. Eazy's business practices and lifestyle set the bar for hip hop. But in the end, shockingly, he succumbed to AIDS. Black motorist Rodney Glenn King's videotaped beating, at the hands of Los Angeles police, was a watershed moment in American racial history, focusing massive public attention for the first time on the issue of racially motivated police brutality and the perils of driving while black. King's sacrifices paved the way for movements like Black Lives Matter and worldwide calls for racial equality. A look at what happened that fateful night, from both inside and outside of King's vehicle. Freeway Rick Ross didn't invent crack. But he probably did more than anyone else to cause its spread. The way he sees it, Ross was a banker in a shadow economy-an American capitalist in the grand tradition of our country's rags-to-riches folklore, bringing jobs and riches to his people and himself. How one illiterate man from South Central Los Angeles changed the course of history. *With additional interior art by WBYK."

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9781950154401

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Reviews

Sager plays Virgil in the modern American Inferno . . . Compelling and stylish magazine journalism, rich in novelistic detail. -Kirkus Reviews Like his journalistic precursors Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Sager writes frenetic, off-kilter pop-sociological profiles of Americans in all their vulgarity and vitality . . . He writes with flair, but only in the service of an omnivorous curiosity and defies expectations in pieces that lesser writers would play for satire or sensationalism . . . A Whitmanesque ode to teeming humanity's mystical unity. -The New York Times Book Review I once described Mike Sager as the Beat poet of American journalism. The title is still apt. For decades, he has explored the beautiful and horrifying underbelly of American society with poignantly explicit portrayals of porn stars, swingers, druggies, movie stars, rockers, and rappers, as well as stunning stories about obscure people whose lives were resonant with deep meaning-a 92-year-old man, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, a 650-pound man. He became a journalistic ethnographer of American life and his generation's heir to the work of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. His imposing body of work today is collected in more than a dozen books and eBooks. -Walt Harrington, author and past head of Journalism at the University of Illinois. Sager takes us inside different worlds in a way that is immediate, vivid, and dramatic. He doesn't hover 20,000 feet above his subject and just gives you an overview-instead, you are right there on the ground level. He has a rare ability to get people to tell him things that they wouldn't tell other people, maybe not even themselves. He earns their trust by hanging around, by not pushing or manipulating. By being genuinely interested. Because Sager doesn't put any barriers between us and his characters, and because he renders them so thoughtfully and with such compassion, readers are allowed to focus on the drama of the stories. Above all, Sager doesn't get in the way of the story. He is not a commentator or a pundit. He doesn't analyze, his pieces don't have an obvious aim or thesis. His prose is so direct and unfussy, it's almost invisible, like a camera. And yet there is a propulsion to it because in almost every sentence you'll find a fact-that blessed newspaper training. The sentences flow with a definite rhythm, but Sager's style is unadorned with falsity, unburdened by over-interpretation. He's a natural storyteller. You never get the feeling he's there just to show off, only to entertain you. -Alex Belth, editor of EsquireClassic.com and The Stacks Reader Series

Author Information

Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter. He's been called the Beat poet of American journalism. For more than forty years he has worked as a writer primarily for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, GQ, and Esquire. In 2010 he won the American Society of Magazine Editors National Magazine Award for profile writing. A number of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired movies and documentaries, including Boogie Nights. The author of a dozen books and eBooks, Sager is also the editor and publisher of The Sager Group LLC.

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