Not for prudes.
Raucus, sexy memoir by the sensation-seeking pioneer of punk rock.
Cherry Vanilla, born Kathleen Anne Dorritie in 1943, was the youngest of four children of a brutal sanitation worker and indulgent hotel-switchboard operator. After graduating from a Catholic school in Brooklyn, she went on the prowl in Manhattan for sex, drugs rock 'n' roll and a way to make a buck using her street smarts and creative spirit. She first found haven among the Mad Men in ad agencies—mostly of the gay male persuasion—but soon finagled her way into spinning records at a chic nightclub called Aux Puces. She fell into acting for the Ridiculous Theater Company, setting her up to win the lead part in the London production of Andy Warhol’s first theater piece, Pork, based on his lurid phone conversations with Factory “superstar” Brigid Berlin. There, she had a prescient appreciation for David Bowie, whom she would befriend, bed and help get known in America. Meanwhile, the author applied her insatiable appetite for sex—which inspired her to print come-on cards with her number on them to hand to handsome strangers wherever she found them—to a lifestyle she felt a calling for: groupie. The narrative occasionally devolves into a recitation of people that Cherry Vanilla has met (Don Ameche, Dean Martin, Abbie Hoffman, John Lennon, etc.) and had sex with (John Hammond, Kris Kristofferson, Bobby Keys, Cousin Brucie, etc.). Her observations on the ’60s (“the fabulous psychedelic decade that we already sensed would go down in history as the defining one of our generation”) are often clichéd and perfunctory, though this may be a factor of her having spent so many of those years stoned out of her gourd. The most affecting sections deal with her working-class childhood, but throughout, the author’s salty sweetness and lust for life exude from the pages.
Not for prudes.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55652-943-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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