A harrowing but ultimately inspiring remembrance with skillful prose.
A girl leaves home at 16 and eventually becomes an acclaimed singer and owner of a thriving business in this memoir.
Miller opens her debut book with a terrifying sequence in 1987, when she was a teenager: On Christmas Day, she writes, her mother brandished a 12-inch knife and threatened to kill her. Miller’s vivid writing makes the scene feel real and engaging: “She chases me from the kitchen to the living room, waving the blade and cursing as a hundred tiny lights twinkle from our tree.” That mix of frightening and beautiful imagery is on display throughout this book,which follows Miller from her days of struggling in Des Moines, Iowa, to her later success in San Francisco. After the Christmas incident, Miller was briefly homeless; she got a restaurant job but continued to keep up her schoolwork and study the violin. A music scholarship led her to Iowa State University in 1989, she writes, where she met her future husband, an architect; she dropped out but later enrolled at Des Moines’ Drake University. There, Miller began to find her voice as a singer. She moved to San Francisco, had a daughter at age 23, went to work as a graphic designer at an ad agency, and developed impressive management skills along the way. She and her husband divorced, but by then, her singing—she performed at weddings and other events in the Bay Area—had caught the attention of the likes of singer Frederica von Stade and songwriter Bobby Sharp (writer of the Ray Charles hit “Unchain My Heart”). Eventually, she recorded Sharp’s songs on her own record label and received good reviews in major newspapers. Overall, this is a memoir that begins bleakly and ends triumphantly, with Miller the head of a thriving music and special events company and making beautiful music on the side. The author takes readers along with her for the entire ride, and while she’s doing it, she not only bares her soul, but also shares useful life lessons that readers may take to heart.
A harrowing but ultimately inspiring remembrance with skillful prose.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985600223
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Poignant Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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