A frank, forthright memoir that provides a new perspective on a familiar theme.
A memoir from the lead singer of the band Gossip, chronicling her upbringing in rural Arkansas.
While it's true that rock musicians often front-load a lifetime's worth of excess into the first decade of their success, and write their memoir about it from old age—if they make it that long—Ditto's memoir, written with the assistance of Tea (Rose of No Man's Land, 2006, etc.), swings the focus around to the years before her band became successful. The author grew up deep in rural Arkansas, part of a large family that moved in and out of a generous (though also poor) aunt's house, with cousins and siblings and other relatives seeking refuge from alcohol, abuse or the law. Ditto shifted between experimenting with pushing the limits—such as they were, with little adult oversight—and trying to preserve the small pockets of safety available for her younger relatives. High school found her coming out and connecting with other gay students, only to see them leave—they were older and graduated first—and Ditto's senior year stretched out ahead of her. Even leaving school and Arkansas behind and rocketing into the music scene came with difficulties that reflected both the realization of her ambitions and the reality that you can't run from your problems. Ultimately, the book is a rags-to-riches tale that mostly rises above cliché and avoids tired tropes. “What I want is the same thing everyone wants,” she writes, “the same thing you want—to hurl myself into this world and trust that it will catch me.”
A frank, forthright memoir that provides a new perspective on a familiar theme.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-52591-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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