Based in the London bureau of Rolling Stone, American journalist Greenfield (A Day in the Life: One Family, the Beautiful...
A rock journalist mines the same vein for the third time, parlaying his brief access to the Rolling Stones into a short book that reads more like an annotated magazine article.
Based in the London bureau of Rolling Stone, American journalist Greenfield (A Day in the Life: One Family, the Beautiful People, and the End of the Sixties, 2009, etc.) enjoyed exclusive access to the Stones’ farewell tour of Britain, before tax issues (and drug laws) sent the band on self-imposed exile. Such access would be impossible to imagine today, and perhaps the main value of this book, written 40 years after the fact but expanding on a feature that he filed for the magazine at the time, is the difference between the rock life then and now. The Stones could actually move about without causing riots when they were recognized, and a journalist could just hang around without anyone questioning his presence. The author had never seen the Stones perform before 1970 and has never seen them again in concert since 1972, so his window of experience is narrow, though his insights into the relationship between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards remain valid (if familiar). That 1971 tour found Jagger courting his future wife, Bianca, (a marriage that the author asserts “put the final nail in the coffin of the personal relationship between Mick and Keith”) and Richards out of control (and rarely on time) with heroin. The account provides a short companion piece to the book Greenfield wrote with greater detail, but less exclusivity, on the Stones’ subsequent tour of the United States (S.T.P., 1974).Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-306-82312-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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
