In the end, though, it all feels a little sad, and Buell has the smarts to know it: “I wanted to make others happy more than...
A name-dropping memoir (“I had a similar experience with Salvador Dalí”) by the ex-model who became lover and muse to a 30-year stretch of American glitterati.
Buell moved to New York in 1972 and began a remarkable series of affairs with rock musicians, fashion photographers, and assorted celebrities. Although she claims that she was never simply questing after sex (and that she felt hurt because “people always wanted to have sex with me, instead of wondering what I thought or felt”), she sure describes it with great gusto here. There were, for starters, Todd Rundgren (“incredible sexual energy, we had sex all the time”), David Bowie (“I don’t think I was really his cup of tea sexually. I wasn’t black and I wasn’t weird”), Jimmy Page (“When he kissed me, he loved to spew his saliva into my mouth”), Rod Stewart (“We really liked each other sexually and had a real fondness for one another”), Elvis Costello (“unbridled and mutually satisfying passion”), and Jack Nicholson (“I was having my first very cool sex-against-the-car-with-Jack Nicholson lesson”). Although she does develop a theme along the way, the author is perfectly happy simply to pursue the famous (“I got to see Keith Moon before he died”) or go gaga over John Lennon (“Oh man, if he wasn’t special, then I’m insane”). She also has some tender recollections of Mick Jagger (“the first time in my life that I had an orgasm without clitoral stimulation”). The saving grace is that Buell has a carbonated sense of humor, describing herself as a “quasi-scene-maker pseudocelebrity” and dubbing Steve Tyler (of Aerosmith) “ ‘the poor man’s Mick Jagger’ because of the remarkable resemblance in their lips.” Less lively pages are devoted to her own singing career and life with daughter Liv Tyler.
In the end, though, it all feels a little sad, and Buell has the smarts to know it: “I wanted to make others happy more than I wanted to make myself happy.”Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26694-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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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