An “only in America” story with Horatio Alger as a rapper and neo-soul singer.
An entertaining memoir that captures the voice of an artist who hasn’t necessarily accomplished enough to warrant the telling of his life story.
Musical memoirs have become a hot commodity, and Green is a brash and savvy-enough entertainer to know to strike while the iron is hot. He made his breakthrough as the singer of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” which he followed with the viral solo hit known to some as “Forget You.” He then parlayed that into TV exposure on The Voice. Even for those aware of his musical back story with the Goodie Mob, such a career might be covered in a long magazine profile. But if the ebullient entertainer born Thomas DeCarlo Burton is mainly a legend in his own mind, he seasons that legend with plenty of spice in a book that (written with journalist Wild) shows how, “in the epic journey that has been my life, there are good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains, beautiful princesses, shape-shifting mutants, and pretty much everything in between.” Green also provides an inspirational mandate: “I write this book not just to celebrate my own voice and to revel in my own success story, but to encourage the next generation of underdogs to listen closely to the voices in their own heads….May we all find our voices and keep rising together.” For all his grandiosity, CeeLo (who seems to be moving toward single-name status) is a funny guy with a colorful story to share, from his proto-gangster days as a petty criminal in his native Atlanta through his musical redemption. The most revelatory parts concern the creative tension in his teaming with Danger Mouse as Gnarls Barkley, “a couple of crazy mutants who met in the dark and created a spark of something bigger than both of us.” His showbiz ambitions culminate in a Vegas review, “CeeLo Is Loberace,” inspired not only by Liberace, but Elton John.
An “only in America” story with Horatio Alger as a rapper and neo-soul singer.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-1667-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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