Of interest to aspiring or working DJs, but the mostly tepid stories won’t hold wide appeal.
An autobiography by a veteran female DJ in New York City.
After four decades on air, Miller still works as a DJ at Clear Channel's Q104.3 FM and Sirius/XM radio. In her debut book, she chronicles her entire life, beginning with her 1950s childhood in Fort Bragg, N.C., Brooklyn, N.Y., and suburban Nassau County, where she grew up in a somber household with Jewish parents whose lives had been "tainted by tragedy" stemming from World War II. Music-related memories include being riveted by Elvis's performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 and attending a Beatles concert in 1964. "The current music was just about my only source for the alien but evidently essential information about socializing,” she writes, “since such things were never spoken about at my house." Miller also discusses her college career at the University of Pennsylvania, where she started working in radio. Subsequently, she worked as a DJ in Philadelphia, and then New York, focusing on classic and progressive rock. An early fan of Bruce Springsteen, Miller describes meeting and/or interviewing celebrities such as Lily Tomlin, Paul and Linda McCartney and Murray Head, as well as briefly dating Steven Tyler. Darker chapters of her personal life include a long-running battle with breast cancer, which followed a doctor's misdiagnosis, a costly divorce and her struggle with uterine cancer. Throughout the book, Miller's voice remains upbeat and energetic, despite the shadow of her family's mysterious health issues. Her enthusiasm for rock ’n’ roll vividly colors her life, if not these pages.
Of interest to aspiring or working DJs, but the mostly tepid stories won’t hold wide appeal.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-184524-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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
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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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