It’s still the same powerful book that I read in 1978, where Papa LaBias and His phenomena Just Grew is alive today in the swag of funk and the ever expanding reach of hip hop around the planet, and the whole world is dancing in spite of the "wall flower order" and the Noses!

Ishmael Reeds inspired fable of the ragtime era, in which a social movement threatens to suppress the spread of black culturehailed by Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred greatest books of the Western canon In 1920s America, a plague is spreading fast. From New Orleans to Chicago to New York, the Jes Grew epidemic makes people desperate to dance, overturning social norms in the process. Anyone is vulnerable and when they catch it, theyll bump and grind into a frenzy. Working to combat the Jes Grew infection are the puritanical Atonists, a group bent on cultivating a Talking Android, an African American who will infiltrate the unruly black communities and help crush the outbreak. But PaPa LaBas, a houngan voodoo priest, is determined to keep his ancient cultureincluding a key spiritual textalive. Spanning a dizzying host of genres, from cinema to academia to mythology, Mumbo Jumbo is a lively ride through a key decade of American history. In addition to ragtime, blues, and jazz, Reeds allegory draws on the Harlem Renaissance, the Back to Africa movement, and Americas occupation of Haiti. His style throughout is as avant-garde and vibrant as the music at its center. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Ishmael Reed including rare images of the author.

Julia Phillips? Somebody should make a beat and do a hip-hop record to her entire book! She wore Hollywood a new asshole!!! don't nobody dis nobody that hard but Hip-Hop! She should be a west coast gangster rapper or star in Love and Hip-Hop Hollywood!! She let me slide because "I brought my own!" That book ‘til this day leaves a good taste in my mouth.

Julia Phillips became a Hollywood player in the freewheeling 1970s, the first woman to win the Best Picture Oscar as co-producer of The Sting. She went on to work with two of the hottest young directorial talents of the era: Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver) and Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Phillips blazed a trail as one of the very few females to break into the upper echelons of a notoriously chauvinistic industry. But for all her success, Phillips remained an outsider in the all-male Hollywood club. She had a talent for deal-making, hard-balling and wise-cracking, and a considerable appetite for drink, drugs and sex. But while these predilections were tolerated and even encouraged among 'the boys', Phillips found herself gradually ostracized. By the late 1980s she was ready to burn bridges and name names, and the result was this coruscating memoir of her career. Julia Phillips died on 1 January 2002 at the age of 57, but her book will stand as one of the classic exposeacute;s of La-La-Land in all its excesses and iniquities.

You can OD just reading about his drug escapades! Case in point: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas gave me a instant habit just opening the book!!! I was surprised to see the movie was able to capture the same euphoric insanity Thompson delivered in the book, especially the hotel scene and the lizards and dinosaurs he envisioned in his ether induced stream of consciousness.

Also recommended by: Anthony Bourdain

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken. Now this cult classic of gonzo journalism is a major motion picture from Universal, directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro. From the Trade Paperback edition.