There are many voyages here, some flashes of vision, and plenty of pretense.
The silky voiced singer looks back on his career and life.
It would be hard to improve on the author’s description of his younger self: “I live in my own rarified air. I put the ‘e’ in ‘artist’ every day.” There have been few popular music memoirs with more literary references and less of a sense of self-deprecating humor. Though Garfunkel (Still Water: Prose Poems, 1989) knows that he is generally dismissed as the secondary partner to songwriter Paul Simon—“I was a ‘BOUNCE,’ a sort of wall / and he of course had the ball”—this singular mixture of verse, doggerel, blog and diary entries, soul-baring confession, and lists of hundreds of books read is less about setting the record straight on Simon and Garfunkel than allowing readers to gaze into the poetic soul of an artist who variously sees himself as Don Quixote, James Joyce, Rimbaud, Odysseus, Whitman, and Prometheus. “I have these vocal cords. Two,” he writes. “They have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of God’s gift running through me.” Simon may have written the songs, but Garfunkel had the voice, the hair, and the looks, and he got the girls. But all things must pass. “Does anyone notice the faint aroma of slowly decaying flesh?” he asks. “I’m depressed. All is vanity. Where is meaning?” Much of the book is about the joy he has found as a husband and a father, and some of it is about his acting career, which established him as a presence apart from Simon. “Before there was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, there was Simon and Garfunkel—an extraordinary, a singular love affair,” he writes, though the relationship is as ambivalent as it is symbiotic. Now, many decades on, “I am an old boatman / I cast my net of pretense before me / Then I sail into it.”
There are many voyages here, some flashes of vision, and plenty of pretense.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-35247-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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