Barring the intermittently self-important tone and preachy anti-drug caveats, this is an evocative, albeit uneven portrait...
Guitarist of a quintessential ’80s British New Wave rock group reflects on the “roller coaster ride” of pop stardom.
In prose brimming with drinking-buddy informality, Taylor begins by summarizing his middle-class upbringing in early-’70s Birmingham and his parents’ doomed marriage. After stints in cover bands, he answered a guitarist-wanted ad in Melody Maker and, still in his teens, became a member of Duran Duran, the “it” band at Birmingham’s notorious Rum Runner club. Swept up in the “New Romantic” movement, the quintet generated immediate industry buzz and quickly acquired fashion-model girlfriends, recreational drug habits and a fat record contract from EMI. Yet Taylor doesn’t fixate too much on the expected sex-and-drugs-related action. Rather, he emphasizes the money they made and the shameless conspicuous consumption they indulged in, including juvenile hijinks at expensive hotels (Taylor ran up a $450,000 bill at one establishment) and outrageous expenditures on food, houses, video shoots, cars and parties. The memoir solidifies Duran Duran’s status as pop music’s poster children for the materialistic Reagan-Thatcher ’80s. Their exotic videos, Anthony Price suits and hooky, synthesizer-heavy songs made them fixtures on the Billboard charts and darlings of the early MTV age. Taylor depicts his band mates as distant and uncommunicative, with financial success eventually leading them all into typically self-destructive behavioral scripts. More engaging are his anecdotes about musicians outside the Duran Duran circle, e.g., Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Robert Palmer and Rod Stewart. Some seriously dramatic interludes eventually creep into his recollections. The band agitated thousands of Buddhist monks on a video shoot in Sri Lanka; they were secondary targets of an IRA bomb threat; and Taylor’s wife twice endured frightening postnatal psychotic breaks.
Barring the intermittently self-important tone and preachy anti-drug caveats, this is an evocative, albeit uneven portrait of the limitless privileges and life-draining pressures of day-to-day life in the rock ’n’ roll touring bubble.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-50930-5
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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