Shaw tries to pull off the same trick here as Alan Light did with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in The Holy or the Broken...
The juxtaposition of two of America’s most enduring national anthems.
The beginning of this provocative history of Woody Guthrie’s persistent folk song and elementary school staple “This Land is Your Land” and Irving Berlin’s overly sentimental “God Bless America” is a visceral scene. Writes music and theater critic Shaw, “Woody Guthrie was worried he might freeze to death. Twenty-seven years old and almost completely unknown, he was hitchhiking to New York and had been stuck outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, standing for hours in a snowstorm, waiting for someone, anyone, to pick him up.” It’s also a supposition, one of many that the narrative is built around: “Some people say that it was when he was freezing on the side of the road that he started thinking about a rebuttal [to “God Bless America”], a song that would give vent to his leftist politics.” What people, exactly? From there, this is a by-the-books (lots of books, with little original research) retelling of a story most folk-music fans know already. Shaw tries hard to weave tenuous threads between Berlin, the wealthy, internationally famous songwriter, and Guthrie, the singer/songwriter with a chip on his shoulder and a bunch of Carter Family melodies in his head. Berlin’s story doesn’t resonate well here; even 40-something years gone, Guthrie casts a very long shadow. Shaw does unearth an interesting alternative version of “This Land is Your Land” from the Woody Guthrie Archives. Written in the 1950s, it loses much of its politics, substituting mystical imagery about fertility and joy. For readers who want to delve deeply into one of these two specific songs, this book is a pleasant, harmless diversion. More casual readers would be better served by Joe Klein’s 1980 biography or, better yet, Woody’s own 1943 story, Bound For Glory.
Shaw tries to pull off the same trick here as Alan Light did with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in The Holy or the Broken (2012), but there’s too little weight here to justify the act.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61039-223-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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