An exhaustive look at the short life of the Who’s legendary drummer. Fletcher follows Keith Moon from his childhood in the London suburb of Wembley through his apprenticeship in the Beachcombers, his 15-year tenure in the Who, and his death by overdose at the age of 32. The writer’s principal task seems to be to dispense with the apocryphal stories that surrounded Moon’s wild life. We learn, for instance, that Moon never drove a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool (actually, while drunk, he accidentally backed the Rolls into a small pond on his property). In clarifying the record, however, Fletcher paints a vividly ugly picture of Moon as wife-beater, drunk driver, and all-out pathetic drunkard. Unfortunately, Fletcher is first and foremost a fan, and his desire not to paint too dreadful a picture of Moon leads to pleading many, many excuses for his infantile behavior, including a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, when it seems quite clear that drugs and particularly alcohol lay at the bottom of most of Moon’s problems. Still, the musical aspects of the biography are well done; here, in tying Moon’s own story closely to the Who’s, Fletcher is at his strongest. The author conducted a broad range of interviews with industry friends and associates of Moon’s, not the least of them Who bassist John Entwistle. And Fletcher’s presentation of the Who as one of the few bands able to stand the test of time with their integrity intact is notably persuasive. When Fletcher follows Moon to his exile in California during the mid-1970s, he loses the anchor of the Who’s career, and the work suffers. Episodes regarding Moon’s abortive career as a comic actor only partially redeem these portions of it. Few questions will now remain about Moon’s life—in fact, you may know more than you wanted to. (24 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1999
ISBN: 0-380-97337-5
Page Count: 632
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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