A warm, witty portrait of a quietly extraordinary American life.
Lowbrow TV-actor-turned-congressman relates his strange life and times.
No, it’s not Sonny Bono, or even Fred Grandy. Surely no one was clamoring for a memoir from Jones, semi-famous for portraying the begrimed mechanic “Cooter” on The Dukes of Hazzard before serving two terms as a Democratic U.S. congressman from Georgia. So this modest tome is a pleasant surprise, as he relates the events of his unlikely life with appealingly low-key charm and easy humor. Born in crushing poverty to an alcoholic railroad man and his defeated wife, the author grew up in a shack in Virginia, following in his dissolute father’s footsteps while racking up failed marriages and stints in jail. But he yearned for something better, haphazardly cultivating an interest in literature and theater between blackouts, eventually finding sobriety and gainful employment maintaining the Duke boys’ General Lee on network television. Jones’s account of his dark years is perhaps too restrained; he alludes to various categories of bad behavior and leaves it at that. The book really picks up steam with his post-Dukes congressional career, a development that surprised Jones as much as anyone. He dishes freely, delightedly reporting on the crookedness and venality of the party machinery that opposed him. The case for campaign-finance reform has seldom been made so entertainingly as in his account of an underfunded and idealistic outsider running afoul of institutionalized graft, corruption and hypocrisy. (Newt Gingrich won’t be providing a blurb.) A late highlight of the narrative is Jones’s trip to Tiananmen Square, where he violated diplomatic protocol and staged a small protest in the name of the murdered student protestors, infuriating the Chinese brass. That gesture sums up his public life: small-scale, sincere and sympathetic to the little guy. Jones currently curates a phenomenally successful annual Dukes of Hazzard fan festival at which “Crazy Cooter” remains a major draw. God bless America.
A warm, witty portrait of a quietly extraordinary American life.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39527-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
