A collection of short, easily digestible anecdotes—of her first Rolling Stones concert, her first solo recording, her first wedding ceremony—told by Cher and committed to paper in a tone of talkiness that seems to come straight from the tape recorder. Each brief recollection, some not more than a paragraph in span, stands on its own, but the separate reflections combine to tell the larger story of Cher’s bumpy rise from poor sassy kid and naive starlet to independent singer and award-winning actress. Much to her credit, Cher has bypassed the common pitfall of the confessional genre: that of over-analyzing minor events and attributing to them major, long-term outcomes. Instead, the memories are stated sparsely; she doesn—t spend too much time explaining them or justifying them emotionally. The result: a lighter, more enjoyable read. Though her bits and pieces don—t always hang together solidly, and don—t always follow in exact chronological order, the overall effect is nevertheless like listening in on Cher’s candid musings about significant events in her life. Oddly enough, her gimmicky format (most vignettes end too conveniently with an aphorism) actually works. Co-author Coplon has also been co-author to Sarah, Duchess of York. Despite cute, contrived styling, the reminiscences unfold in an honest and personal (though sometimes —performed—) fashion. As an added bonus, one can open the book at almost any page and start right in—the perfect arrangement for hard-pressed readers. (32 pages color and b&w photos) (Television satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-80900-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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