Week Six, Assignment One: Something I learned about my "genre link."

Street Fiction is owned (or at least heavily subsidized) by Amazon.  But so is Goodreads and so, soon, will be Google!  Or vice-versa, one of those. 

That said, all the books that are being pushed on Street Fiction are (surprise!) available through Amazon.  The "reviews" are your common garden-variety Amazon reader-reviews, but that's not a bad thing -- some of these reviews are well written and very useful, especially in genres we're not familiar with. 

I clicked on the sub-link for "urban non-fiction" and found at least two books I want to read, one based on the reviews herein, the other based on them and the personal recommendation of a friend who happens to be reading that book at the moment.  The first is an academic bibliobiography of Iceberg Slim, by Peter Muckley -- which also makes me want to read Slim's fiction.  The second is the autobiography of the actress/semi-reformed-criminal Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, who played Snoop on HBO's The Wire, of which I'm a big fan. 

Amazon reviews are hit and miss, as is much of the Internet -- and there's always the suspicion that at least some of the reviews in Amazon are written by paid shills rather than real readers.