by Bill Anderson & Peter Cooper ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2016
Anderson is a uniquely country personality, and that personality shines through.
A genial account of a gentleman musician’s life in and around Nashville.
They don’t make them like Whisperin’ Bill Anderson (b. 1937) anymore, though, as co-author Cooper (Country Music History/Vanderbilt Univ.) suggests, it is the coda to his career that has made it extraordinary, “the most thrilling, exhilarating, and unprecedented part of his journey.” By 1980, Anderson had been considered washed up, on the verge of bankruptcy, and hurting physically, his success as a songwriter and as an unlikely performer of his own songs long gone. Yet a decade later, he began a resurgence as a co-writer with younger artists such as Vince Gill and Jon Randall, enjoying a success that not only rivaled his former songwriting glory, but earned him far more in royalties, as country music royalties were far more lucrative than they had been during Anderson’s 1960s heyday. Country fans know Anderson as the writer of “City Lights,” a big hit for Ray Price when Anderson was still a college journalism student, and for his own hit recording of “Po’ Folks,” which became the name of his band and led to an adventure in restaurant franchising that almost left him broke. Some know of his pivotal role in the careers of Connie Smith and others and maybe even how he helped establish the popular Fan Fair as a Nashville tradition. Though Cooper has established himself in the first rank of country journalists and historians, Anderson’s voice is what makes this narrative so distinctive, as he recounts how he was “happier than a pig in a mud puddle” when he landed his first job at a radio station and was so flustered around women that he “didn’t know whether to wind my watch or take a bubble bath” when a pretty one asked him to dance. There are also plenty of anecdotes about the rigors of touring and the process of writing hit songs.
Anderson is a uniquely country personality, and that personality shines through.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8203-4966-4
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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