Summer of Hamn: Hollowpointlessness Aiding Mass Nihilism

--Selected for the In the Margins Book Awards 2024 Nonfiction Recommendation List

"With his latest work of graphic nonfiction, Chuck D uses his art and hip-hop rhymes to show how the US has been held hostage by gun violence and a growing sense of hopelessness . . . A focused, fresh, urgent text filled with pictures worth 1,000 words and rhymes worth thousands more." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

IN SUMMER OF HAMN, legendary hip-hop artist Chuck D takes on gun violence with rhythmic, inventive writing and passionately raw art. He has long spoken out against gun violence, including how it intersects with rap and hip-hop culture. Summer of Hamn is the bound journal Chuck D carried with him in the summer of 2022--a summer marked by a particularly high rate of gun death.

In these pages, victims are memorialized, politicians are skewered, and vehement pleas to eradicate gun violence are made. Jaw-dropping statistics (40% of all personal guns in the world are owned by US citizens; there are 100 million more guns in the US than there are citizens) intersect with poetic reflections ("Another mall shooting seems normalized in Columbus / Raining outside in Ohio / Raining inside folks panic / Inside hearing shots bust"), all written in Chuck's hand over vibrant, utterly original, neoexpressionist ink and watercolor art.

This book is the follow-up to STEWdio the debut trilogy on Chuck D's Enemy Books imprint, in which he invented a new medium--the "naphic grovel"--a bound journal brimming with his observations and reflections of current events in both art and prose. Summer of Hamn is the second release on the imprint.

Author: Chuck D
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Akashic Enemy Books
Published: 10/03/2023
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.46lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.60w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781636141527


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 06/01/2023
Publishers Weekly 10/30/2023

About the Author
Chuck D is the leader and cofounder of the legendary rap group Public Enemy, a social activist, multimedia producer, visual artist, digital music pioneer, and author/illustrator of STEWdio: The Naphic Grovel ARTrilogy of Chuck D. He has been featured in more than one hundred documentaries on music, technology, politics, and race, and cocurated the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap. He has also been a national spokesperson for Rock the Vote, the National Urban League, Americans for the Arts, and the National Alliance of African American Athletes. As part of Public Enemy, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and earned a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.