From Pieces to Weight

Curtis James Jackson III was the child of a mother who supported her extended family (which seems to have consisted of alcoholic uncles and cocaine-addicted cousins) by dealing drugs, and who was murdered when he was eight. He was 11 years old when crack cocaine became the street drug of preference and he began his own drug-vending career. In FROM PIECES TO WEIGHT, the future 50 Cent recounts his rapid rise in the street drug business, which was only interrupted by his realization that if he continued in it much longer, he'd be dead. Rap music, while not a vocation, provided a less lethal alternative. With an authentically thuggish background (as he states, there's no such thing as a gangsta rapper--you're either one or the other), Jackson survived the verbal barbs of jealous peers, as well as nine bullets from one of his more homicidally inclined ex-colleagues, to become one of the best-known rap artists in the world. Concentrating on the hardscrabble years before his arrival at superstar status, his autobiography is a stark depiction of thug life, often violent and always gripping in its candid revelations of the harsh realities of street survival.