Dense and definitive—best appreciated with a record player handy.
A comprehensive chronicle of the jazz legend’s life.
The name Thelonious Monk (1917–1982) has long been surrounded by a kind of tragic mystique. Few question his unparalleled talent, but the taint of mental illness has cast him as a bit of an outsider. With this encyclopedic portrait, Kelley (History and American Studies and Ethnicity/Univ. of Southern California; Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2002, etc.) attempts to correct the many misconceptions, both personal and musical, that haunted Monk throughout his life and attended his image in the press. To combat the charge that Monk had no formal training and no knowledge of classical music, the author offers numerous examples from his childhood and teen years, when he rattled off Rachmaninoff at top speed. Kelley’s anecdotes show a humorous, generous and outspoken man who was beloved by family and friends—almost the opposite of the brooding, quizzical persona with which he greeted the press. From his formative years in the fertile soil of 1930s Harlem, Monk was a New Yorker through and through. He struggled to rise from penury and play his music for audiences that didn’t really understand his “weird” chord progressions and unique rhythms. Eventually he achieved the recognition he deserved, though his rise to success was long and difficult. At the height of his career, mental illness plagued him everywhere but at the piano. Written with the full cooperation of Monk’s wife, there can be little doubt that Kelley gets the facts straight. He includes plenty of firsthand accounts from those who knew the musician best, and his actions are meticulously recorded. However, few of Monk’s own words make it onto the pages, and the author does not attempt to devise overarching themes from his experiences. Ultimately the subject remains elusive. The degree of detail in this straight-ahead biography makes it unsuitable for the casual fan, but jazz aficionados will cherish it.
Dense and definitive—best appreciated with a record player handy.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-684-83190-9
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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