Tips memilih Hotel Murah di Jakarta

Tips memilih Hotel Murah di Jakarta

saco-indonesia.com, Indonesia merupakan negara dengan sistem sanitasi ( pengelolaan air limbah domestic ) terburuk ketiga di Asi

saco-indonesia.com, Indonesia merupakan negara dengan sistem sanitasi ( pengelolaan air limbah domestic ) terburuk ketiga di Asia Tenggara setelah Laos dan Myanmar ( ANTARA News, 2006 ). Menurut data Status Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia tahun 2002, tidak kurang dari 400.000 m3 / hari limbah rumah tangga yang dibuang langsung ke sungai dan tanah, tanpa melalui pengolahan terlebih dahulu. 61,5 % dari jumlah tersebut telah terdapat di Pulau Jawa.

Pembuangan akhir limbah tinja umumnya telah dibuang dengan menggunakan beberapa cara antara lain dengan menggunakan septic tank, dibuang langsung ke sungai atau danau, dibuang ke tanah , dan ada juga yang dibuang ke kolam atau pantai.
Di beberapa daerah pedesaan di Indonesia, telah masih banyak dijumpai oleh masyarakat yang berada di bawah garis kemiskinan dengan sanitasi yang masih sangat minim. Masih sering dijumpai oleh sebagian masyarakat yang telah membuang hajatnya di sungai karena tidak mempunyai saluran pembuangan khusus untuk proses pembuangan air limbah rumah tangga maupun air buangan dari kamar mandi. Bahkan terkadang juga masih dijumpai masyarakat yang membuang hajatnya di pekarangan rumahnya masing-masing. Hal ini telah terjadi selain disebabkan karena factor ekonomi, faktor kebiasaan yang sulit dirubah dan kualitas pendidikan yang relative rendah dari masyarakat pun juga memang sangat berpengaruh besar terhadap pola hidup masyarakat.

Berdasarkan perkiraan WHO/ UNICEF, sekitar 60 persen penduduk di kawasan pedesaan di Indonesia telah kekurangan akses terhadap sarana sanitasi yang pantas. Kegiatan mandi dan mencuci pakaian di sungai serta buang air besar di tempat terbuka telah membuat orang mudah terpapar penyakit, mengontaminasi air tanah dan permukaan, serta menurunkan kualitas tanah dan tempat tinggal. Perempuan dan anak-anak berada dalam risiko.

1. PENGERTIAN SANITASI
Sanitasi adalah bagian dari system pembuangan air limbah, yang khususnya telah menyangkut pembuangan air kotor dari rumah tangga, dapat juga dari sisa-sisa proses industry, pertanian, peternakan dan rumah sakit (sector kesehatan).
Sanitasi juga merupakan suatu usaha untuk dapat memberikan fasilitas di dalam rumah yang dapat menjamin agar rumah selalu bersih dan sehat. Tentunya tang ditunjang penyediaan air bersih yang cukup, dan pembuangan air kotoran yang lancar.

2. AIR LIMBAH
Air Limbah adalah air buangan yang telah dihasilkan dari suatu proses pruduksi industri maupun domestik (rumah tangga), yang terkadang kehadirannya pada suatu saat dan tempat tertentu tidak dikehendaki lingkungan karena juga tidak memiliki nilai ekonomis. Dalam konsentrasi dan kuantitas tertentu, kehadiran limbah juga dapat berdampak negative terhadap lingkungan tertutama kesehatan manusia sehingga dilakukan penanganan terhadap limbah.

Air kotor adalah air bekas pakai yang sudah tidak memenuhi syarat kesehatan lagi dan harus dibuang agar tidak dapat menimbulkan wabah penyakit
Beberapa hal yang berkaitan dengan pengertian dan kegiatan yang berhubungan dengan limbah cair menurut PP 82 tahun 2001 yaitu :
1. Air adalah semua air yang telah terdapat diatas dan dibawah permukaan tanah, kecuali air laut dan fosil.
2. Sumber air adalah wadah air yang telah terdapat diatas dan dibawah permukaan tanah, seperti, mata air, sungai, rawa, danau, waduk, dan muara.
3. Pengelolaan kualitas air adalah upaya dalam pemeliharaan air sehingga dapat tercapai kualitas air yang diinginkan sesuai peruntukannya untuk dapat menjamin kualitas tetap dalam kondisi alamiahnya.
4. Pengendalian pencemaran air adalah upaya untuk pencegahan dan penanggulangan pencemaran air serta pemulihan kualitas air untuk dapat menjamin kualitas air agar sesuai dengan baku mutu air.
5. Pencemaran air adalah masuknya makhluk hidup, zat, energy, dan atau komponen lain kedalam air oleh kegiatan manusia sehingga kualitas air turun sampai ketingkat tertentu yang dapat menyebabkan air tidak berfungsi lagi sesuai dengan peruntukannya.
6. Limbah cair adalah sisa dari sutu hasil usaha dan atau kegiatan yang berwujud cair.
7. Baku mutu limbah cair adalah, ukuran batas atau kadar unsure pencemar yang ditenggang keberadaannya dalam limbah cair yang akan dibuang atau dilepas kedalam sumber air dari suatu usaha atau kegiatan.

3. ALAT PEMBUANGAN AIR KOTOR
Alat pembuangan air kotor dapat berupa :
- Kamar mandi, washtafel, keran cuci
- WC
- Dapur
Air dari kamar mandi tidak boleh dibuang secara bersama sama dengan air dari WC maupun dari dapur. Sehingga harus dibuatkan seluran masing-masing.
Diameter pipa pembuangan dari kamar mandi adalah 3” (7,5 cm), pipa pembuangan dari WC adalah 4”(10 cm), dan dari dapur boleh dipakai diameter 2”(5cm). pipa pembuangan juga dapat diletakkan pada suatu “shaft”, yaitu lobang menerus yang disediakan untuk tempat pipa air bersih dan pipa air kotor pada bangunan bertingkat untuk dapat memudahkan pengontrolan. Atau dapat dipasang pada kolom-kolom beton dari atas sampai bawah. Setelah sampai bawah, semua pipa air kotor harus juga merupakan saluran tertutup di dalam tanah agar tidak menimbulkan wabah penyakit dan bau tak sedap.
Dibawah lantai, semua pipa sanitasi diberi lobang control, yang sewaktu-waktu dapat dibuka bila terjadi kemacetan.

4. JENIS-JENIS UNIT PENGOLAHAN AIR LIMBAH
a. SEPTICTANK
Sistem septic tank sebenarnya adalah sumur rembesan atau sumur kotoran. Septic tank juga merupakan sitem sanitasi yang terdiri dari pipa saluran dari kloset, bak penampungan kotoran cair dan padat, bak resapan, serta pipa pelepasan air bersih dan udara.

Hal-hal yang yang harus diperhatikan saat pembangunan septic tank agar tidak mencemari air dan tanah sekitarnya adalah :
1. jarak minimal dari sumur air bersih sekurangnya 10m.
2. untuk dapat membuang air keluaran dari septic tank perlu dibuat daerah resapan dengan lantai septic tank dibuat miring kearah ruang lumpur.
3. septic tank direncanakan untuk pembuangan kotoran rumah tangga dengan jumlah air limbah antara 70-90 % dari volume penggunaan air bersih.
4. waktu tinggal air limbah didalam tangki diperkirakan minimal 24 jam.
5. besarnya ruang lumpur diperkirakan untuk dapat menampung lumpur yang telah dihasilkan setiap orang rata-rata 30-40 liter/orang/tahun dan waktu pengambilan lumpur diperhitungkan 2-4 tahun.
6. pipa air masuk kedalam tangki hendaknya selalu lebih tinggi kurang lebh 2.5 cm dari pipa air keluar.
7. septic tank harus dilengkapi dengan lubang pemeriksaan dan lubang penghawaan untuk dapat membuang gas hasil penguraian.
Agar septic tank tidak mudah penuh dan mampat, awet dan tahan lama perlu diperhatikan hal berikut :
1. Kemiringan Pipa
Kemiringan pipa menentukan kelancaran proses pembuangan limbah. Selisih ketinggian kloset dan permukaan air bak penampung kotoran minimal 2 %, artinya setiap 100cm terdapat perbedaan ketinggian 2cm.
2. Pemilihan Pipa yang tepat
Pipa saluran sebaiknya berupa PVC. Ukuran minimal adalah 4 inchi. Rumah yang telah memiliki jumlah toilet yang banyak sebaiknya harus menggunakan pipa yang lebih besar. Perancangan saluran diusahakan dibuat lurus tanpa belokan, karena belokan atau sudut juga dapat membuat mampat.
3. Sesuaikan Kapasitas Septic tank
Untuk rumah tinggal dengan jumlah penghuni empat orang, cukup dibuat septic tank dengan ukuran (1.5×1.5×2)m. bak endapan dan sumur resapan bias dibuat dengan ukuran (1x1x2)m. semakin banyak penghuni rumah maka semakin besar ukuran yang telah dibutuhkan.
4. Bak Harus Kuat dan Kedap Air
Septic tank harus terbuat dari bahan yang tahan terhadap korosi, rapat air dan tahan lama. Konstruksi septic tank juga harus kuat untuk menahan gaya-gaya yang timbul akibat tekanan air, tanah maupun beban lainnya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.

In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.

One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.

But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.

JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”

Photo

In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”

That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.

But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.

“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”

THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.

In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.

“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”

They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.

They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”

Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”

The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.

Photo

Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”

The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.

Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.

The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”

Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”

Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.

For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”

Photo

Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.

The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.

But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:

WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT USING A GUN:
MURDER . . . 30 Years
ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years
ASSAULT . . . 15 Years
RAPE . . . 20 Years
POSSESSION . . . 5 Years
JACKING . . . 20 YEARS

“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”

One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”

A 214-pound Queens housewife struggled with a lifelong addiction to food until she shed 72 pounds and became the public face of the worldwide weight-control empire Weight Watchers.