This inelegant argument won’t change many minds among critics or the public.
A valiant but unsatisfying effort to reappraise a band loved by the masses and loathed by critics.
The Bee Gees, Manchester-born brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb, had been performing around Australia for nearly a decade before bursting onto the British scene in 1967 with the Beatles-esque lament “New York Mining Disaster 1941.” Within a year, they rivaled their idols for top spots on charts around the world. Addictions and sibling rivalry between eldest (and arguably most talented) brother Barry and the more volatile Robin caused the band to implode within three years. After reconciling, the Gibbs scored a couple more hits (including “How Do You Mend a Broken Heart?”) in the early 1970s before sinking briefly back into obscurity, only to resurface in a big way with a wholly new sound rooted in the subversive beats of disco with “You Should Be Dancing” (1975). With their association with the monster hit Saturday Night Fever, the Bee Gees never had to look back—at least as far as the public was concerned. Critics, however, have always considered them imitators and also-rans. Meyer (Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music, 2007, etc.) convincingly argues that the band innovated (e.g., by inventing the drum loop on their huge hit “Stayin’ Alive”) as much as they imitated. Oddly, his narrative stalls when the Bee Gees are on its stage, mainly since he quotes decades-old interviews by other journalists. The book comes alive when tracing the history of disco that led to the making of SNF and telling the tragic tale of the youngest Gibb, Andy, whose growing up in public foreshadowed the reality TV culture of today. Otherwise, the history drags and repeats itself. The Gibbs quotes and connecting narrative could have used a tighter edit.
This inelegant argument won’t change many minds among critics or the public.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-306-82025-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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