Where Tomorrows Aren't Promised (Unabridged)
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From iconic NBA All-Star Carmelo Anthony comes a New York Times bestselling memoir about growing up in the housing projects of Red Hook and Baltimore—a brutal world Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised.
For a long time, Carmelo Anthony’s world wasn’t any larger than the view of the hoopers and hustlers he watched from the side window of his family’s first-floor project apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He couldn’t dream any bigger than emulating his older brothers and cousin, much less going on to become a basketball champion on the world stage.
He faced palpable dangers growing up in the housing projects of Red Hook and West Baltimore’s Murphy Homes (a.k.a. Murder Homes, subject of HBO’s The Wire). He navigated an education system that ignored, exploited, or ostracized him. He suffered the untimely deaths of his closely held loved ones. He struggled to survive physically and emotionally. But with the strength of family and the guidance of key mentors on the streets and on the court, he pushed past lethal odds to endure and thrive.
By the time Carmelo found himself at the NBA Draft at Madison Square Garden in 2003 preparing to embark on his legendary career, he wondered: How did a kid who’d had so many hopes, dreams, and expectations beaten out of him by a world of violence, poverty, and racism make it here at all?
Carmelo’s story is one of strength and determination; of dribbling past players bigger and tougher than him, while also weaving around vial caps and needles strewn across the court; where dealers and junkies lined one side of the asphalt and kids playing jacks and Double Dutch lined the other; where rims had no nets, and you better not call a foul—a place Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
As an adult, basketball superstar Carmelo Anthony has enjoyed wealth and fame. But as this evocative memoir shows, his youth was all about making it out alive. Born in Brooklyn’s Red Hook projects and then raised in a notoriously violent area of Baltimore, the hoop prodigy watched as friends and family got caught up in a cycle of drugs and guns. Melo doesn’t waste time bragging on himself—instead, he uses his pulpit to talk about what’s wrong with where he came from and what should be done to fix it. (He saves his strongest rebukes for an educational system that he claims was more interested in cashing in on his b-ball talents than in teaching him.) Listening to the All-Star read his story in his own voice is a moving experience. By ending this memoir at the moment he was called up in the NBA draft, Anthony shifts the focus from his athletic success, asking us to take a hard, honest look at what he had to endure to get there and to think about all the talented young Black children facing huge obstacles.
Customer Reviews
Hidden Knowledge
Great story on Carmelo Anthony and a few history lessons good read.