White, the platinum-selling R&B singer and internationally renowned “guru of love,” brings his satiny style to this rags-to-riches autobiography. Love Unlimited, coauthored by music biographer Eliot (To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles, 1998, etc.), is not just another celebrity memoir. Throughout, White sprinkles bits of his wisdom on love (“If you love someone you must not be afraid to tell them, to show them, to lead them to your heart”) and how to be successful with the opposite sex. Much of his “advice,” written as introductions to each chapter, borders on being cheesy. But the way these digressions stay true to White’s sensitive yet macho musical persona saves them from falling over the edge. In fact, the highest compliment that can be paid to the writing approach here is that often you can almost hear White’s deep voice reading the words. However, the core of the narrative is White’s compelling life story. He talks openly about growing up in South Central Los Angeles—being raised almost exclusively by his mother (he and his father reconciled later in life)—his and his brother Darryl’s early “gang-banging” days, and how music saved him from the fate that would one day tragically befall Darryl. On occasion, such as when White writes of how hearing Elvis Presley’s “It’s Now or Never” transformed him while he was in jail, the tale slips into melodrama. Yet White’s insights on music, particularly how he works in the studio, the artists who influenced him, and the importance he places on it (he refers constantly to “Lady Music” as the one true love of his life), are strong compensation for the sporadic forays into soap opera—ish writing. Love Unlimited is not great literature, but it never intended to be. It is, like its author, honest and from the heart. And, more than anything, it is oh-so-smooth.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7679-0364-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
