A must-read for the Prince die-hards who have remained devoted through the musical meanderings of the last three decades.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the making of the popular Prince movie—and much more.
There are two justifications for this book. The first is the 30th anniversary of Purple Rain, the blockbuster movie and album that transformed Prince from a cult favorite into the supernova of popular culture. The second is the exhilaration of the ascent as experienced by a high school senior, later to be a well-respected music critic and editor. For Light (The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah," 2012, etc.), then and now, Prince’s genius is a given, and the movie’s landmark status is beyond argument: “From all of Prince’s groundbreaking work, it is Purple Rain that endures first and foremost. It will always be the defining moment of a magnificent, fascinating—if often erratic—career. It carries the weight of history.” Lest this seem like hyperbole, the author quotes another critic who reviewed the movie at the time as “the best rock film ever made.” Since Prince doesn’t care much for anniversaries or looking back and has described the movie’s success as “my albatross,” Light didn’t bother asking him to reflect on that period. Instead, he relies on seemingly limitless access to his musical collaborators, the first-time director (who later became Prince’s manager), his publicists and his girlfriends. Beyond the minutiae of moviemaking and who was sleeping with whom, the book is particularly incisive in providing context, showing how video technology and black crossover artists were changing the marketplace. A few of the revelations are real howlers—e.g., a studio suggestion that the untrained actor with a couple of hit singles wasn’t really big enough to carry the movie and that maybe he should be replaced by John Travolta. But mainly, Light commemorates an anniversary that might otherwise have passed without much notice.
A must-read for the Prince die-hards who have remained devoted through the musical meanderings of the last three decades.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476776729
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
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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