Best read as an antidote to the usual Morrison hagiographies by adoring critics.
A memoir of a tempestuous affair between a young art student and a tortured rock god.
Huddleston (Creative Writing and Integrated Arts/California State Univ., Monterey Bay; This Is the End, My Only Friend: Living and Dying with Jim Morrison, 1991) returns to the subject of her first book: her intimate relationship with the Doors’ singer and leader. The perspective of 40 years since Morrison’s death has stripped the author of some of her delusions of youth. Still, apparently relying on diaries from the era, she captures the fresh confusion of emotions she felt each time her path crossed his during their four-year relationship. As an 18-year-old, she harbored the very square fantasy of marrying her lover/idol, a fantasy she knew to keep to herself; she knew he had a longtime relationship with Pamela Courson (whom she identifies only as “Pam” in the book). Huddleston eventually learned that her own relationship with Morrison was in fact far from unique and meant nowhere near as much to him as it did to her. If there’s an added value to the book for Doors fans, it may lie in the author’s vivid portrait of the mercurial Morrison, whose persona could metamorphose from that of a vulnerable little boy to a sexual sadist in a matter of seconds. Readers will catch on fairly quickly that Morrison was never interested in Huddleston as much more than a sexual partner. From her first intimate encounter with him (which ended in a brutal anal rape) to the last some months before his death in Paris in 1970, she doesn’t get any closer to answering the question of who Morrison really was or why he was so psychically wounded.
Best read as an antidote to the usual Morrison hagiographies by adoring critics.Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61374-750-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
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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