Deep reporting makes this a treasure trove for anyone interested in the blues and Vaughan’s place within popular music.
An oral biography that illuminates how far the inspiration of the virtuosic guitarist extends beyond music.
In the late 1980s, Stevie Ray Vaughan (1954-1990) was on the verge of drugging and working himself to death; he was forced to face the fact that if he didn’t change his ways, he wouldn’t last much longer. So he changed—his habits, perspective, relationships, routines, and music—and became as obsessed with living healthy and following 12-step precepts as he had been with scoring dope. He recorded an album with his older brother, Jimmie, his idol, one of the many musicians who had followed Stevie’s example by getting clean and sober. Sadly, when he had been sober for a few years, living happier and playing better than ever, he died in a helicopter crash following a concert, when the weather should not have permitted takeoff. He was just shy of 36 years old. Like co-author Paul’s previous oral history, One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (2014), this account is exhaustive, drawing extensively from interviews with those who knew Stevie best—his brother, band mates, and the other musicians who witnessed his rise and fall—with the exception of his ex-wife. The narrative chronicles his lifelong obsession with his instrument, his transformation from Steve Vaughan the geek kid to Stevie Ray the guitar god, the ways in which his band was more like a family, and the reverence he displayed toward his idols. Paul and Aledort’s interviews also underscore Vaughan’s profound influence on other musicians, first as a blues revivalist who brought the music back into the mainstream and then as a testament to a sobriety that enriched his artistry. It’s a tragedy that the story had to end the way it did, but the authors show why the story still matters almost 30 years after his death.
Deep reporting makes this a treasure trove for anyone interested in the blues and Vaughan’s place within popular music.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-14283-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
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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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