Gushing, not to say ecstatic, exercise in groupiespeak, and a sequel to Des Barres's I'm with the Band (1987). Des Barres's follow-up to her days with the rock fabs begins as a rerun but soon settles into the downside of her glory days: adult life, more or less, though the endless name-dropping requires a rock-'n'-roll directory. As the memoir begins, still-unmarried Pamela Miller, introduced on the Today show as ``Queen of the Groupies'' (``Wow. What a twisted and unique legacy. I never know whether to defend myself or take a bow''), is madly in love with drug-and-booze-ridden Michael Des Barres, a ``glitter-glam'' British rock star who has just helped form a new group, which flops. Insecure Mike and moaning Pam fly to jobs on both coasts and hop over to England to see Mike's parents. Pam's own group, Girls Totally Outrageous, folds, but Pam runs about getting film parts (with Sly Stallone in Paradise Alley, among others) and finding entertainment niches for her talents. But ``the magic dust on the Sunset Strip had turned into sticky wads of filthy goop that stuck to the bottom of my platforms.'' Pam and Mike buddy or room with burgeoning greats Don Johnson, Melanie Griffith, Tom Cruise, and others. Throughout, Pam keeps a diary (excerpted occasionally here), and at last marries bombed-out Mike and has a child. Eventually, Mike joins AA, which works for him, and by book's end is a tower of honesty—but not before he begins playing around during early sobriety, leading to an inevitable separation. Meanwhile, Pam lands a big-time rock star (known here only as ``HIM'') and has a yearlong, super-private sex affair ``on this flaming rocket trip to the stratosphere.'' Dumbfoundingly overripe musk, but just right for the right ears. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-09149-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
