by Chuck Klosterman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 19, 2005
Entertaining in a spontaneous, distracting way. When it ends, though, and Klosterman slams shut the door to his head, most...
A transcontinental road trip mostly along the byways and back roads of Spin magazine writer Klosterman’s own head, resulting in an enjoyable, polyphonic interior monologue.
Early on, you get the warning: this will have all the earmarks of a “reliance on self-indulgent, postmodern self-awareness” as Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, 2003, etc.) fields an assignment to visit the death sites of a number of rock ’n’ rollers, an odyssey that could yield some insight as to why death equals credibility and bestows messianic qualities in the world of rock, or why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing. And Klosterman does get around to taking a stab at the question—it says more about the fans than the artists—but he is chiefly interested in himself (though, happily, not in love with himself), engaging in extended riffs on his likes and dislikes in music and, most captivatingly, on the pathos of his love life (chimes of High Fidelity here, but readers will know that Klosterman has actually felt the sting, again and again). His brash honesty—“your entire existence as a rock critic is built around the process of reviewing your mail”—is shown both by an easeful descriptive talent as he drives from town to town, seeking the last place Duane Allman and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kurt Cobain and Holly-Valens-Bopper saw the light of day, and by slices of dark humor (as when his sister accidentally hit a cow with her car “and the old sleepy-eyed heifer went down like Frazier getting tagged by Foreman”). He can also be exasperatingly logorrheic, but road-trippers are on a ramble, after all.
Entertaining in a spontaneous, distracting way. When it ends, though, and Klosterman slams shut the door to his head, most of what went before melts into air.Pub Date: July 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6445-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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