What distinguishes this book from a lot of other fairly bad memoirs—e.g. RZA's "The Wu-Tang Manual" and Wiley's "Eskiboy"—is how "U-God" Watkins doesn't brag that much. For example, this is from the start of the book:

My mother’s from Brownsville, Brooklyn. She was raised in the same project building as Raekwon’s mother, at 1543 East New York Avenue, in Howard Houses. The Brownsville projects were the wildest, period. Ask anybody from New York City what part of Brooklyn is the roughest, they’re gonna say Brownsville. Some projects you could walk through. Some you couldn’t. At its worst, you couldn’t walk through Brownsville. You couldn’t walk through Fort Greene or Pink Houses either. The tension and violence was always in the air in those places. Guaranteed there was gonna be fights topped off with a few people getting cut or stabbed, and even back then there might have been a shooting or two. Someone would probably end up dead by the end of the ruckus. That’s why I don’t like going back to my old projects nowadays; I feel like the spirits of my old comrades are calling to me. They’re still haunting the projects they hustled at and got killed in.

That's a spiritual thing. It's also a simple description. It's not a oh, I'm so cool, I can beat down anybody, yada yada.

This is also another revelation:

I don’t know who my father is or where he comes from; I wish I could find out more about him. A big part of why I don’t know much about him is because of how I was conceived. My mother probably wouldn’t want me to bring this up, because she hates me talking about it, but I was a product of rape. I was a rape baby. She told me my father had tricked her into believing he was a photographer and wanted her to model for him. He told her she was a natural beauty and all this other fly shit. He lured her to a spot and took advantage of her. She never pressed charges and never even reported it.

I always like memoirs where people are able to take the piss out of themselves, and U-God does that. Here's another example from his growing up:

Fighting—the art of hand-to-hand combat—was a big thing growing up. You had to know how to use your hands. Guns weren’t the weapon of choice until later—you used your fists or a knife. That’s one thing about Island dudes; they know how to throw their joints. I didn’t have older brothers to hold me down, so I had to fight my own battles against kids my age and pretty much anybody else who tried me. To this day, fists aren’t my last resort, they’re my first. That’s why I sometimes have trouble relating to people who have never fought or who have never been punched in the face. How much can you know about yourself until you’re in a physical altercation? There are people today who have never been punched in the face. That’s why they’ll knock right into you as they walk by in the street and not even excuse themselves. They have no basic respect for anyone around them. Not enough people living in New York today have been punched in the face. They could use that lesson, though. I feel that confrontation brings respect. People who keep doing sneaky shit keep getting away with it, often because no one’s willing to call them on it. Whether in humility or self-confidence, they need that lesson. Getting tested lets you find out who you are deep down. And I found out that deep down I’m a scrapper. I’m also respectful, though. If I bump into someone, I excuse myself. I’m a humble warrior. You can’t go around looking for trouble, but you have to be ready when it comes. You can’t walk around trying to be the toughest, because there’s always someone tougher.

Sadly, U-God and a few other Wu-Tang members subscribe to the bizarre "5 percent" theory, something built by the racistic Nation of Islam organisation, but apart from that, this book contains a lot of interesting and revealing stuff.

He writes a lot about becoming and staying friends with Method Man, which is quite lovely. Also, it reveals a lot of how much members of Wu-Tang actually contributed to the whole thing, not just RZA:

We were both writin’ at that time, kicking around ideas together when we weren’t mopping the floors and hauling garbage and doing all this crazy shit for Mr. Hill, our boss. We used to write rhymes on the back of coasters, just sitting in the back of the shit on garbage detail and writin’. We’d pick up these little paper coasters to write on, and one day Meth said, “Yeah, C.R.E.A.M.: Cash Rules Everything Around Me.” He started tagging everything with that acronym—the project walls, Dumpsters, train cars, whatever he could find. I remember when I said that should be a fucking hook; we made that fucking shit up way back then. True fact: The title of Wu-Tang’s first hit single started with Meth and me sitting at the Liberty Island garbage detail.

This was quite weird to read, apropos nothing:

Let me tell you one thing about me; I love money more than I love anything in this goddamned world, except for my family and my babies. I love money more than I love drugs, women, all of that. I’m addicted to money. I like to have it. I like to spoil the people I love. I will never touch no cocaine or none of that shit ever again. I am straight weed, alcohol, and that is it. Money, weed, that’s it. I’ve stuck by that shit for the rest of my life.

There's also a lot of funny stuff in the book:

There was some funny shit that would go down in the midst of all that carnage. Like this one time, this fiend approached me and Meth while we were selling. He didn’t have any cash, but he wanted two dimes of crillz (crack) in exchange for a sheet of acid with a picture of a skull and crossbones. Meth figured it was a good trade, so he did it. I said, “Man, you are fuckin’ crazy!” He took a few tabs and offered me one. I declined the offer, saying, “I ain’t trying nothing with a poison sign on it!” and continued serving fiends.

Pretty soon Meth starts feeling the acid, he starts tripping and crawls into some bushes. Meanwhile, the stash was getting low, so I decided to head uptown to get some more. I went all the way uptown to Harlem, which takes about three hours round trip. I saw the connect, got what I needed, and came all the way back to Staten Island. When I got back, Meth was still in the bushes. A three-hour mission, and upon my return he was still in the bushes. I was like, “What the fuck? This dude’s out of his goddamn mind.” I went over to him and asked, “You all right?” He looked up at me. “Nah … I ain’t all right …” Whatever effect that drug had on him, it had him stuck in the bushes. I grabbed him to pull him out of there, but then he took off like a shot down the block. I had to literally chase this motherfucker down, laughing the whole time. We got around the corner, got some water into him, tried to flush that shit out of his system. I told him, “Yo, man, don’t ever take that shit while you’re hustlin’!” Just another day in the projects.

U-God also sets the record straight with RZA, and remember, U-God hit him and others with a 2.5 million USD lawsuit. U-God writes about that, too, but optimistically looks towards the future.

All in all, this book was interesting, well written, fun, and mainly it gave a lot of heft to U-God's story. ( )