Nevertheless, as cultural history and biography this is both cogent and entertaining, if occasionally over-written.
Murray (Crosstown Traffic, not reviewed) turns his attention to one of Hendrix’s musical forebears, bluesman John Lee Hooker.
It is tempting to see Hooker, as Murray does, as an archetypal figure. Indeed, his story has been duplicated in the lives of many African-Americans who made the trek northward from the Mississippi Delta to the burgeoning industrial Midwest in search of an escape from the grinding poverty of sharecropping and the oppressions of Jim Crow. Hooker was born sometime between 1917 and 1920 (although he has claimed several other dates) near Clarksdale, Mississippi. He went north to Detroit just before WWII and, after a very brief stint in the Army, scuffled through a series of short-term day jobs, all the while expecting to make a living as a musician. Miraculously, he did just that, with a series of recordings made for a small label owned by Bernie Besman. One of the very first sides Hooker cut for Besman, “Boogie Chillen,” became an instant and enormous success—it continues to sell even today—and put Hooker on his way to fame. Since that explosion, Hooker’s career has charted the same ups and downs common to other blues giants of his generation (Muddy Waters comes to mind) with a mixture of classic blues recordings and misguided attempts to capture a rock audience. Now somewhere in his 80s, Hooker continues to tour with a band, an experience that Murray limns convincingly. The author’s reach often exceeds his grasp, however, as he tries to render Hooker as a larger-than-life figure of myth—even going so far as to invoke Joseph Campbell. Hooker is a musician, a master of a narrow slice of a much larger and complex pie called the blues; Murray should have let his story speak more for itself.
Nevertheless, as cultural history and biography this is both cogent and entertaining, if occasionally over-written.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26563-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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
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