In 2007, New York writer Thomas Chatterton Williams penned a controversial pair of Washington Post essays decrying the “cool pose” that has many African-Americans identifying with the gangsta culture often glorified in hip-hop. His new memoir Loosing My Cool (Penguin, $25.95) chronicles his own double life in that regard. As a mixed-race suburban kid, he’s caught between the intellectual world of his father, a sociologist, and the lure of performers selling bling and street cred on BET. His own story, as he wrote in the Post, illustrates the pull of an “inverted-pyramid hierarchy of values stemming from the glorification of lower-class reality.” Doing better in school, he discovers, loses him black friends who accuse him of not “keeping it real.” Does this make him a hater of Jay-Z and company? Not exactly—Williams spends little time bashing the thugs and violent figures in hip-hop. (He also skims over new intellectual ferment in that movement.) But the gangsta rap hero needs a counterexample—one that Williams eloquently provides. NICK FELDMAN

Tue., May 11, 7 p.m., 2010