A sobering look at the ugly side of rockin’ and rollin’ all night.
Catman Criss recounts his nine lives of decadence, depravity and dissolution in and out of the rock band KISS.
At the outset of this sleaze-fueled memoir, we see the author half-zonked on the floor following an earthquake with the barrel of a gun stuck halfway down his throat. And then things started getting ugly. KISS’ larger than life comic-book personas and hook-laden anthems may have dazzled teenagers in the ’70s, but behind the garish face paint and superhero costumes loomed a lot of deeply disturbing darkness. Criss’ own life growing up hard on the streets of Brooklyn was no cakewalk. As the drummer describes it here, those times were often both violent and depressing. Struggling hard to shake off the streets, the increasingly desperate-to-make-it musician eventually fell in with a couple of other New York City knuckleheads with the idea of becoming superstars. To say that Criss still maintains huge reservoirs of hatred toward former band mates Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley is a colossal understatement. Simmons and Stanley—who, according to the author, cheated, degraded and maligned him in the most remarkable ways even years after he left the group—are portrayed as two of the most repugnant, self-absorbed characters to ever step onto a concert stage. Sadly, it’s hard to generate too much sympathy for Criss himself, due to his own well-documented deficiencies. By his own account, he’s been a belligerent, self-centered misogynist addicted to clichéd rock excess for most of his life. But the larger, and more moving, story is one of redemption and of a deeply flawed individual endeavoring to become a better man. Astonishingly, by the end of this sordid tale, Criss largely succeeds.
A sobering look at the ugly side of rockin’ and rollin’ all night.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2082-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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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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