A complex take on the often simplified topic of contemporary manhood, with relevance to current cultural controversies...
A meditative memoir by a first-generation Colombian-American who forged personal identity through music, faith, and fatherhood.
In his debut, NPR cultural critic Vidal synthesizes cultural critique and personal history, attempting to understand how his generation of African-American and Latinx men have transcended expectations and stereotypes to establish family and community structures as the titular “rap dads.” His initial intent, he writes, “was to chronicle my journey to manhood and fatherhood and what it has meant to me as an artist.” He vividly recalls his own rambunctious South Florida childhood, which included an absent father with a criminal reputation and his own dabbling in delinquency, culminating in a disciplinary year exiled to his relatives in Colombia. This fueled an interest in spirituality, which led to a stint with a youthful, Christian hip-hop collective; while his group toured and recorded, they found it hard to break through. “By the time I hit twenty-two,” he writes, “I already felt ancient.” Despite thwarted ambitions, he pursued music even as he married and had the first of three children, admitting, “doubt crept into my gut. I carried it around the way my wife clung to joyful anticipation.” Eventually, he transitioned from performing music to writing about it, necessity and enthusiasm fueling a career as an editor and freelancer. Vidal captures the serenity and enthusiasm fatherhood engendered in his peers: “Now we shot hoops and curbed our language, our kids orbiting us like small planets.” He varies this narrative with cogent discussions of (and sometimes with) key rap figures like Nas, Chuck D, and Jay-Z, noting, “it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that hip-hop helped raise me.” Vidal’s writing on diverse topics is thoughtful and sometimes funny, but his focus on personal experiences can be repetitive, with narrative aspects that can peter out or seem generalized.
A complex take on the often simplified topic of contemporary manhood, with relevance to current cultural controversies regarding immigration and identity.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6939-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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