Initially thrilling but finally artless, with little for the casual fan.
The cute Beatle may not have been quite so cuddly.
Sandford (Keith Richards, 2004, etc.) rejects the idea that among the Beatles, John Lennon was the caustic poet of depth and insight while Paul, though he may have had a knack for good tunes, was more interested in commerce than art. Sandford’s by-the-numbers bio comes up with plenty of evidence to support the idea that McCartney was much more of an innovator than generally credited: He basically invented the concept album, he was an early acolyte of John Cage and he pioneered the use of found sound, tape loops and other avant-garde standards. This insight alone, however, isn’t sufficient to justify yet another McCartney book. Starting off, rather oddly, with the musician’s 1980 bust for pot in Japan, Sandford then hops back to Liverpool in the 1930s, where Jim McCartney was a local hit as the head of a rollicking dancehall band. Jim’s son Paul quickly caught the bug, and Sandford dutifully follows the flowering of the teenager’s musical partnership with John, from the Cavern in Liverpool to the Hamburg dives, and to the whirlwind of hit singles and psychotic fans that followed. It’s all well-trammeled ground, and the author at times seems more interested in detailing Paul’s prodigious drug use and legendarily lengthy list of bedmates. Once the Beatles fall apart, Sandford maroons readers in the wasteland of pointless solo albums. Ticking off how many millions were earned with each tour, glossing over the mediocrity of McCartney’s more recent output, he builds little foundation for his conclusion that “we don’t want less of him. We want more.”
Initially thrilling but finally artless, with little for the casual fan.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1614-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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