Amid the glut of music veteran memoirs, this holds more interest than most, though Stewart admits that he isn’t very...
A rock star who realizes that he’s a very lucky man shares how he made his own luck.
Most music fans think of Stewart as the lesser partner in Eurythmics, a duo that owed much of its success to the voice, allure, and songs of Annie Lennox. Yet it was Stewart’s anything-goes adventurism that coaxed the best from Lennox, as he served not only as the sounding board who provided the music, but also the duo’s producer and manager. The most fascinating part of this memoir illuminates the complex relationship the author continues to enjoy with the woman he calls “my dearest friend and closest collaborator,” though what began as a love-at-first-sight romantic relationship was ending even as the two were shifting from the Tourists, their first band together, into the collaboration that would become the Eurythmics. “It’s not easy, this transition from lovers to something else,” writes Stewart. “How do you break up when you’re still together?” Yet just as the contrast between the impetuous Stewart and the more reserved Lennox caused personal tension, their success proceeded from equally disparate elements: “We wanted to create the feeling of beauty and sadness together, like in a garden when the roses have just peaked and are turning blood red—a kind of sweet decay.” Soul and folk, acoustic and synthesized, organic and experimental—“every song became a sonic collage.” His approach also found success beyond the Eurythmics, with Tom Petty scoring big with “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” a song Stewart relates he started after falling into and out of bed with Stevie Nicks. His creative and social orbit eventually included various Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jack Nicholson, and Microsoft’s Paul Allen, though after the Eurythmics, the memoir starts to read, as he quotes an early responder, like “a hell of a cast” in search of a story.
Amid the glut of music veteran memoirs, this holds more interest than most, though Stewart admits that he isn’t very reflective and he too rarely goes deeper than surface anecdote.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-47768-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
PROFILES
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
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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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