A thorough account of a country star’s life occasionally marred by repetitions and unpolished prose.
A debut biography (with a discography) examines a country music performer and his famous song.
During the 1950s, the little town of Clovis, New Mexico, suddenly assumed center stage when Buddy Holly and the Crickets conducted sessions at the Norman Petty sound studio that produced distinctive and unforgettable recordings that helped to create early rock ’n’ roll. Many rockabilly, country, and rock artists who gained considerable fame in those days passed through Petty’s studio. One of them, country singer Charlie Phillips, backed by Holly and some of the Crickets, recorded a little song called “Sugartime” that would become so famous that many today immediately recognize its words: “Sugar in the morning / Sugar in the evening / Sugar at suppertime.” This book chronicles in intimate detail the origins and story of this well-known ditty and its composer. Coming of age in the little West Texas town of Farwell, Phillips soon found himself hanging around with rock stars like Holly and promoters like Odis “Pop” Echols. Echols introduced Phillips to local radio, where he became a fixture as an announcer and DJ for many years. The story of early rock is intertwined with the crucial importance of radio in promoting this music by spinning platters of stars like Elvis Presley, the Big Bopper, Holly, and Phillips. “Sugartime,” covered by the McGuire Sisters, became a smash success in the late ’50s, and with this fame, Phillips’ career took off. While extremely well-researched, this book unfortunately has a few flaws, including odd word usage: “Large crowds could quickly gather in the viscera,” Cushenberry writes of the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium. Dangling modifiers (“After meeting Horace Logan, Charlie’s next introduction would be to a lesser celebrity of sorts”) and punctuation errors (“With Route 66 passing through Amarillo, came an influx of travelers with automobiles”) undermine the author’s obvious enthusiasm and deep knowledge of his subject. The book also keeps looping back in time to repeat the same material from slightly different perspectives. While the work reveals parts of Phillips’ intriguing inner life, it mostly stays on the surface, name-dropping the legends, the venues, and the gigs.
A thorough account of a country star’s life occasionally marred by repetitions and unpolished prose.Pub Date: April 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63490-517-6
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Booklocker
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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