Thorn, Jessie (June 18, 2006). "Dave Chappelle Surprise SF Show Recap". MaximumFun . Retrieved February 25, 2015.

Both Sweet and Iceberg learned hardness and hatred from the traumas of their youth. As Bessel Van Der Kolk said in his book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, “Hurt people hurt other people.” Well, well, well. My boyfriend was talking about this book. For a while it was all flapping lips as I watched him in disgust, but then he started talking about chemistry and set theory. What's the connection? I asked. He said it's all in there. Really? I said. Yes he said. The book sounds like its for perverts and retards, I said. Yes, he said, and no. There are a few other issues I had with the story but all in all I did enjoy my time reading the book. I believe it took me a little over two hours to finish it and I really only found myself skipping a few sections of the ending.I passed beneath an El-train bridge. A terrified, glowing face loomed toward me in the tunnel’s gloom. It was an elderly white man trapped behind enemy lines. A train furled by overhead. It bombed and strafed the street. The shrapnel fell in gritty clouds. Irvine Welsh has stated that Iceberg did for the pimp what William S. Burroughs did for the junky and Jean Genet for the thief, and it's probably true. His influence on rap culture can hardly be overestimated - or why do you think Ice-T and Ice Cube have these names? There also is a documentary about his influence that seems to be pretty good.

Slim knows he doesn’t yet have the toughness or experience to make it as a pimp in this rough town, so he goes looking for a mentor. There is a lot of repetition as well. The author loves to say the exact same thing over and over just dressed a little differently. It wasn’t unlike reading an Ayn Rand novel. It was akin to playing a video game from the 80s where you keep dying on a level and have to start said level over again. You get a little further each time, but you go over the same stuff a lot. See what I just did there? That film was interesting enough to get me to seek out the book if for no other reason than I was curious to see how a pimp might turn pulp novelist. What it lead to was a book that has the ring of true crime novels plus the authenticity of the autobiography. Which is not to say much for truth in either crime novels or autobiographies... but more of that in a bit. Welsh adds that a course at Harvard University featured Pimp as a "transgressive novel". [3] Comedy [ edit ]If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.This book would probably be unpublishable today. It would never make it past the sensitivity readers because the author doesn’t ask for sympathy or forgiveness, nor does he engage in the kind of moral hand-holding readers today seem to demand. He does not condemn each atrocity in the same breath as he reports it. He trusts his readers to be adult enough to recognize the horrors of the world he describes. His conscience does begin to creep in over time, but for the most part, he simply chronicles world as it was, and the things he and others did to survive. That may be too much for some readers. I can see this book being used in middle-management seminars on how to keep your workforce motivated. Replace the word "pimp" with "manager" and "whore" with "subordinate" and you have something fresh for a seminar. Slim had been connected with several other well-known pimps, one of them Albert "Baby" Bell, [5] a man born in 1899 who had been pimping for decades and had a Duesenberg and a bejeweled pet ocelot. [5] Another pimp, who had gotten Slim hooked on cocaine, went by the name of "Satin" [5] and was a major drug figure in the eastern part of the country. [4]

This is one brutal book, and a damn good one. Slim writes with a fire that you rarely see even from great authors at their best. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything, nor does he lace his narrative with apologies to reassure delicate readers. He simply gives a straightforward account of a cruel world in which the cruelest rise to the top… at least for a while. If you want to be a master, you have to find someone beneath you to enslave, someone even more down and out than yourself. Sweet says, “‘Berg, ain’t but one real Heaven for a pimp. He’s in it when there’s a big pool of raggedy, hungry young bitches.” By that measure, the ghetto in Chicago during the depression, full of desperate souls with no escape, was a pimp’s Heaven. (Though Slim always describes the ghetto as Hell with a capital H.) Miriam Bale (July 18, 2013). "Movie Review: The Lessons of a Pimp - Ice-T Produces a Documentary About Iceberg Slim". The New York Times . Retrieved November 11, 2013.

In his special The Bird Revelation, comedian Dave Chappelle used the life of Iceberg Slim and the world of his book Pimp as a parable for his experience in show business. [18] [19] Fast, I got to find out the secrets of pimping. I don’t want to be a half-ass gigolo lover like the white pimps. I really want to control the whole whore. I want to be the boss of her life, even her thoughts. I got to con them that Lincoln never freed the slaves.” After learning the subtle nuances of the pimping game from Sweet and his pal “Glass Top”, Slim experiences the ups and downs of the lifestyle he sought; his bitches rat him out to the feds, he almost screws a tranny in a ridiculously hilarious scene, he gets swindled and conned, he swindles and cons, he batters his trollops, goes to prison several times, pulls a jailbreak, and discovers it’s feast or famine in this cop & blow game. Sweet teaches Slim to maintain absolute physical and psychological control over his women through physical brutality and psychological manipulation. The treatment he prescribes is essentially the same playbook that plantation owners practiced on slaves: beat them, gaslight them, remind them at every turn that they are worthless and powerless, wring all you can out of them until they’re physically and psychologically ruined. Then go find new ones to recruit.