Both sentimental and inspirational—for fans only.
With the assistance of Rolling Stone contributing editor Wild (He Is…I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond, 2008, etc.), country-music sensation Paisley pridefully shares his thoughts and thanks on a charmed “life in progress.”
Born in West Virginia to a schoolteacher mother and a highway worker, the acclaimed performer enjoyed musically inspired roots peopled with wise advocates who helped shape his moralistic sensibilities. The author fondly recalls the guitar he received from his grandfather, a lover of instrumental country music, on his eighth Christmas. With enthusiastic prose, Paisley writes of a swift ascent to greatness beginning in the third grade, when he asked to play guitar in church. Under the careful mentorship of professional musician Clarence Goddard, his talent branched out to songwriting at age 12 and a warm-up performance at the Wheeling Jamboree. The singer’s good fortune quickly blossomed in Nashville with a first album and the formation of a multi-city tour, what he calls a “curious kind of traveling circus.” Paisley writes of his indebtedness to bands like Alabama, Restless Heart and the Beatles, and to legendary guitarist Buck Owens and the Grand Ole Opry. There are also gushing accolades from country-music luminaries like Vince Gill, Carrie Underwood and Roy Clark, who calls him a “true superstar.” If Paisley is repetitive with personal facts, his praise of hard work is redeeming and honorable; he admits that he would be “at best mediocre if not for ingenuity and sweat.” This sage motto, coupled with the author’s obvious adoration for country music, makes the book ideal for a younger generation of devotees.
Both sentimental and inspirational—for fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2552-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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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