Better written and more thoughtful than David and Joe Henry’s Furious Cool (2013). The latter remains worth reading, but...
Smart blend of social history and biography centering on one of the funniest—and most tragic—people of our time.
By Saul’s (English/Univ. of California; Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, 2003) account, Richard Pryor (1940-2005) wrestled out the demons of physical abuse, racism and addiction on a stage that at first wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. That effort produced some strange results. One of the more interesting detours in this already digressive narrative follows the course of the autobiographical film This Can’t Be Happening to Me, a look at Pryor’s childhood in a brothel; the film started as a broad comedy, then became serious, then took on the coloring of a “tripped-out imagination that made [the film] cousin to a midnight movie like El Topo.” As Saul observes, it helped that Pryor and the family that so often figured in his comedy were “powerfully dramatic people,” thus it was natural that Pryor should so readily bend genres to insert seriousness in funny situations and comedy into grave discussions. Saul’s psychobiographical essays are illuminating, as when he writes of a young Pryor discovering that white girls were more receptive to him than were white boys. Race is a driving theme throughout, and Saul closes on a note that is both hopeful and resigned. Asked whether he viewed the world in terms of black and white, Pryor said, “I see people…as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn’t come to be yet.” Saul is sometimes guilty of forced analogies, as when he finds an echo of the resignation of Richard Nixon, whom a Republican senator compared to “a piano player in a whorehouse who claims not to know what’s going on upstairs,” in Pryor’s own time in the house of bawd. Still, this is a well-executed study that gives Pryor due credit as pioneer, intellectual and artist.
Better written and more thoughtful than David and Joe Henry’s Furious Cool (2013). The latter remains worth reading, but this book is the place to start.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062123305
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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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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