A flash of musical brilliance—“beautiful, haunting, disturbing”—suffocated by a life so relentlessly grim you wouldn't wish...
Music journalist Cross (Nevermind, not reviewed, etc.) treats the short, strange, unhappy life of musician Kurt Cobain with intelligence and an insider's perceptiveness.
Terrible though it was, Cobain's suicide by shotgun in 1994 would never be categorized as a surprise. As Cross explains, Cobain had a lifelong affair with the act, indifferently gabbing about it as a teenager, writing and painting pictures of it, putting it in song lyrics, making a run for it in Rome—only to have his girlfriend find him comatose and rush him to a hospital. Cross picks up Cobain's life story on day one and follows it through his dreadful youth: divorced parents, one inept and the other an alcoholic, never any physical or emotional space for him, finally living out of a cardboard box as a high-schooler. It doesn't take much for Cross to convince readers of the psychological pain that Cobain endured and why he might turn to booze, then LSD, marijuana, cough syrup, and heroin. Certainly, fame was no tonic, nor, ultimately, was his marriage to fellow musician Courtney Love, or his daughter Frances. The best, or at least most telling, material here comes from interviews with friends—Cross had access to Cobain's notebooks, but he has the good sense to appreciate that they contain a good amount of posturing—who describe a wildly creative guy who could also be a “world-class whiner,” someone who cultivated the grunge look, an anti-star who wanted to know why MTV didn't run his video more often, a nihilist who never could shake his shame and self-loathing. Too many demons were crawling around in his skull to ever let him bask in his artistry or the love of the few people who really cared about him. It’s as though Cobain's life was one long session with a particularly evil hair shirt.
A flash of musical brilliance—“beautiful, haunting, disturbing”—suffocated by a life so relentlessly grim you wouldn't wish it on a sworn enemy.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6505-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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