Illuminating and thoughtful, especially for those who can't help but hear Jackson's hit song when they read the book's title.
The calamitous last stage of the singer's life as told by his trusted security team, with the assistance of Colby (Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America, 2012, etc.).
Whitfield and Beard witnessed firsthand how Michael Jackson (1958-2009) squandered his enormous wealth by trusting the wrong people, whose questionable business deals yielded more legal entanglements than profits. They steered clear of the infighting and conflicting agendas among those who oversaw Jackson's crumbling empire and observed how Jackson, deliberately disengaged from his own affairs, was "a billion-dollar enterprise, running 24/7, and there was nobody in charge.” The authors provide solid insight into Jackson's immature behavior—e.g., his ruinous habit of turning to wealthy, powerful figures to rescue him in times of crisis and his blithe dismissal of the harm his staff endured due to his refusal to manage his corrupt advisors. In one incredible story, Jackson asked Whitfield during one of the pop star's famed spending sprees at FAO Schwarz why Whitfield wasn't buying Christmas presents for his own daughter; when he informed Jackson he had not been paid in weeks, he replied "Oh" and did nothing to repair the situation. Jackson was renowned for his enormous compassion and generosity to people in need around the world, but he couldn't see the pain his actions caused the people closest to him. "[B]eing isolated from such a very young age,” write the authors, “he [never] developed the skills you need to cope with personal relationships." The authors also reflect on how Jackson missed out on more than just playtime and friendships: "Childhood isn't just about being a child; it's about becoming an adult,” says Whitfield. “Because eventually you will be an adult, whether you want to or not.”
Illuminating and thoughtful, especially for those who can't help but hear Jackson's hit song when they read the book's title.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60286-250-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
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