Hendrix’s story is finally lost in a purple haze.
Kurt Cobain’s biographer takes on the great rock guitarist’s legacy and misses the mark.
Cross, former editor of the Seattle alternative weekly The Rocket, reached bestseller lists with his biography of Nirvana’s ill-fated front man (Heavier Than Heaven, 2001). In this book he reconsiders another Washington state icon, ‘60s rock superstar Jimi Hendrix. Due on the eve of the 35th anniversary of Hendrix’s death at 27 from an accidental overdose, Cross’ biography sits somewhat in the shadow of Keith Shadwick’s comprehensive Jimi Hendrix Musician (2003), as well as such precursors as Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek’s Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy (1990) and Charles Shaar Murray’s Crosstown Traffic (1989). Cross is strongest in his chapters about Hendrix’s deprived upbringing in Seattle and the first stirrings of his musical urges, but his tales of Hendrix’s apprenticeship on the Southern chitlin’ circuit and his artistic development in the hipster cauldron of Greenwich Village in the mid-‘60s feel underreported. Worse, Hendrix’s 1966 arrival in London, where he quickly became the toast of English musical society, reads like a twice-told tale. We hear again that Hendrix slept with his guitar, but little attention is paid to exactly how he developed his stunning musical and technical gifts. His prodigious mastery of the studio, still a large part of the guitarist’s testament, receives virtually no scrutiny — his sessions are viewed as just part of the blur that accompanied his snowballing fame. While Hendrix’s ascent as a black musician playing for white rock ‘n’ roll audiences (and viewed in some quarters as a racial sell-out) is contemplated, Cross seems either unwilling or unable to grapple with this contradiction, which was so central to Hendrix’s inexorable rise. One ultimately understands that Hendrix was crushed by the burden of celebrity, but the sources of that celebrity remain vague.
Hendrix’s story is finally lost in a purple haze.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-0028-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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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