Forced Entries, The Downtown Diaries
This followup to "The Basketball Diaries" finds Carroll at age 20, still hooked on heroin and obsessively forcing an entry into the glitzy New York scene of the 1970s. He works for artists Andy Warhol and Larry Rivers; hangs out with luminaries like Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, William Burrougs, Ted Berrigan, Patti Smith, and Robert Mapplethorpe; and he makes the scene at the legendary Max's Kansas City, where the Velvet Underground is playing. He comes... The Basketball Diaries
In the midst of the Cold War, war in Vietnam, race riots in New York City, and a turning point in American culture between "Leave It to Beaver" and Woodstock, Jim Carroll began writing his "basketball diaries" at the age of 12. He's an all-city basketball star at an ivy league prep school leading a double life, experimenting with drugs, getting hooked, hustling gay men to support what will become an epic heroin addiction, and . . . becoming a poet. Thi...
