Tate wanders over the Hendrix landscape everywhere and in awe, offering a cerebral and gingery reminder of his subject’s...
A jumpy, fast-talking take on Jimi Hendrix—the social meaning, the sexual mystery, and the music of a “musician’s musician.”
“Race, sex, technology, and Jimi Hendrix—these will position the coordinates on this star map,” explains music journalist Tate (Everything But the Burden, not reviewed). Hendrix was super-elevated for the author, “a living embodiment of all our racial fears, romantic fantasies, otherworldly dreams, and radical desires,” and the writer’s spellbound pyrotechnics can tend at once toward hagiography and hyperbole. Did Hendrix, asks Tate, embody our racial fears, or was he a shape-shifter who could shred racial shibboleths, receiving exceptional “treatment from whites because he was not perceived as a political threat . . . traveled in white company, drew a white crowd, kept a white band, and, oh yeah, bedazzled the Hostiles in a field considered a white man’s province”? Was the inventive life force he found in the Fender Strat based in rhythm and blues, soul, and jazz, or was it a fiery marriage of storefront gospel singer, barwalking saxophonist, and Delta blues? Tate makes Hendrix into a fascinating lawbreaker and Rosetta stone, liquid and languid, “a supersignifier of Post-Liberate Black Consciousness,” possibly “what life as a Black Man without fear of a white planet might look like, feel like, taste like.” Erotic, destructive, chaotic, yet a gentleman too, sartorially definitive, and, oh boy, a musician who could play a loud bolthole to the cosmic, “except [that] the ecumenical Hendrix wanted to pursue a path to cosmos that would be accessible to the average American Pop fan.” Tate is smart and playful, speculating on what might have been if the wine and sleeping pills hadn’t done their work, crafting “some Borgesian fluff for this occasion, confections turned fictions.”
Tate wanders over the Hendrix landscape everywhere and in awe, offering a cerebral and gingery reminder of his subject’s social and musical revolution. (4 b&w photos)Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55652-469-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
IN THE NEWS
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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