Blackboard best-selling author Bertice Berry delivers an entertaining cautionary tale. Everything hip-hop music producer "Freedom" Hudson touches turns to gold. But when he buys a haunted brownstone in Harlem, he gets an earful from a group of ghosts. One of the spirits, an African drummer whose life was destroyed by slavery, has a warning for Freedom: We've passed the drum to you-now use it to send the right message.
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"I learned to marry my love of a dope beat with concious lyrics that don't destroy but builds up. Hip hop is such a moving art form. It just depends where we want it to move and who we want it to empower."
— Desiree (5 out of 5 stars)
“A nimble social commentator, Berry wisely eschews clichés and delivers a powerful story with a message that should not be lost.”
— Essence“Underneath the gothic trappings is a meditation on the price of forgetting history. Like a Bill Withers song, Berry’s writing is infused with an aching nostalgia for an earlier time, when there was ‘more to life than what we could see, touch, hear, or feel.’”
— Publishers Weekly“A delightful tale…J. D. Jackson’s voice envelops the listener, perfectly capturing the African’s patois, the musician’s groove, and the attitude of contemporary African American street culture.”
— AudioFile“Interesting…sure to give young adults something to think and talk about.”
— Booklist" my brother loaned this book to me back in highschool good stuff!! "
— Ian, 1/27/2013" A quick read -- more of an African-American parable about being true to yourself and your ancestors than a fully-fleshed out novel. "
— Lynn, 2/11/2012" I was kind of intrigued by the somewhat creative and creepy premise of this book, but the lessons were just too heavy-handed and the characters and dialogue too formulaic. "
— Katie, 12/17/2010JD Jackson is a theater professor, aspiring stage director, and award-winning audiobook narrator. He is a classically trained actor, and his television and film credits include roles on House, ER, Law & Order, Hack, Sherrybaby, Diary of a City Priest, and Lucky Number Slevin. He is the recipient of more than a dozen Earphones Awards for narration and an Odyssey Honor for G. Neri’s Ghetto Cowboy, and he was also named one of AudioFile magazine’s Best Voices of the Year for 2012 and 2013. An adjunct professor at Los Angeles Southwest College, he has an MFA in theater from Temple University.