London Times jazz writer Shipton tenders a new look at the life of legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. There have been, as Shipton himself points out in his preface, several other biographies of the musician (born John Birks Gillespie), as well as an autobiography that Shipton says, “has often been hailed as a landmark in oral history.” So why yet another examination of the life and music of the Cheraw, South Carolina, native? After posing that same question, Shipton, who also presents jazz programs for the BBC and has written biographies of Fats Waller and Bud Powell, responds, “The answer is to some extent all these books took their cues from him as to the shape and pattern of his life—I began to realize that, without in any way detracting from Dizzy’s immense achievement, there was more to be discovered about the influences on him.” Shipton does indeed concentrate extensively on Gillespie’s early influences, sometimes at the expense of Gillespie’s personal life. For example, even though he promises to explore Gillespie’s long-standing extramarital affair with songwriter Connie Bryson, which resulted in an illegitimate daughter, Jeanie Bryson, Shipton doesn’t get into that until nearly 300 pages into the book. Given that Jeanie was Gillespie’s only offspring, despite a successful marriage of over 50 years to his wife-manager, Lorraine, more attention should be focused on their father-daughter relationship (Gillespie did provide financial support, although he never admitted publicly that she was his daughter). That Shipton would gloss over the rich terrain of Gillespie’s personal life to concentrate on his music is almost commendable in this era of sensationalized biographies. However, he should not have promised to explore these issues if he was not prepared to follow up on them. Torn between the morally upright educated music book and the more sensationalistic material of his subject’s life, Shipton ends up with an unbalanced portrait that fails to satisfy.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-509132-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
