Amiable but with an edge, and good reading for Nelson’s legion of followers.
The beloved outlaw country icon rolls a fat one for his fans and sits down on the porch to spin a few yarns.
Those fat ones are legion in this book, whether in the company of the superbly suave Julio Iglesias or out on the road taking it to The Man. Still, Nelson (Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die, 2012, etc.) opens on an oddly dark note, first conjuring up and analyzing T.S. Eliot and then brooding on his infamous woes with the IRS a quarter-century ago. The author has much more to brood about besides that sorry episode, from the life course–transforming death of family early on to the demise of nearly all of his contemporaries. Yet he’s nothing if not a survivor, accustomed to dusting himself off and going back into battle: “Because I was small, I got the shit kicked out of me. Wound up with a broken nose and busted collarbone, but nothing stopped me….The minute I healed up, I was back out there.” Those battles, too, are many and storied, involving not just the IRS but also the whole of the Nashville establishment; Nelson has found allies in the likes of Ernest Tubb, Johnny Cash, and Chet Atkins. The last counseled, “Be patient, Willie, and you’ll get the mainstream audience you’ve been looking for”—and so Willie was, and so he did. The narrative is sometimes choppy, with staccato one-sentence paragraphs going on for long stretches like an endless jam on “Whiskey River,” and it’s often repetitive, as if—well, as if Nelson maybe rolled one too many before hitting the typewriter. Still, if the stories are familiar, and if we’ve heard them before, he still has much new to say on issues such as privacy, the changing music scene, and, of course, legalization (“I owe marijuana a lot”).
Amiable but with an edge, and good reading for Nelson’s legion of followers.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33931-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
SEEN & HEARD
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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