An up-to-date and revealing rock biography that sets a standard of completion that will likely prove hard to beat.
A full account of the singularly influential English band, drawing on extensive research and interviews with some (but not all) of the major players.
Ever since they broke up 25 years ago, The Smiths have been subjected to an endless stream of biographies and cultural studies. So what does Fletcher (The Clash: The Music that Matters, 2012, etc.) have to add? Up-close scrutiny and a broad sense of perspective. He takes in the local history, delving into the 19th-century politics that formed the gloomy industrial landscape of Manchester, U.K., and shaped the lives of two of its sons: an asexual, vegan, Oscar Wilde wannabe named Morrissey and a T. Rex-worshipping prodigy named Johnny Marr. Fancying themselves the next Leiber and Stoller, they hired bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce and set out on an extraordinary five-year run. Lush, decadent, mopey ballads—about bullying, pedophilia, murder and all-around terminal alienation—appeared at such a frantic rate that not even four studio albums could contain them; some of their best works were singles that arrived in bursts of inspiration. Fletcher, working with the full cooperation of Marr and Rourke, but not Morrissey and Joyce, delivers a credible view of life from inside this whirlwind; he captures the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry of the two leads and closely follows the band’s brief journey from local indie curio to New Wave phenomenon. It isn’t always smooth sailing; the endless backstage business details are a drag to read, and at times (although not always), Fletcher is too charmed by Morrissey to notice just how unpleasant he can be (especially when he’s fantasizing about murdering Margaret Thatcher or romanticizing suicide).
An up-to-date and revealing rock biography that sets a standard of completion that will likely prove hard to beat.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-71595-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
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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