Exclusively for fans.
Reminiscences of the author’s high-school days with slain hip-hop star Tupac Shakur.
Shakur, gunned down early in his career, spent his teenage years at the Baltimore School for the Performing Arts, where he worked on his acting skills, pined for his home in New York City, and met Bastfield, now a music manager. The two became fast friends through their shared love of rap, still a new musical form when the two met in the mid-’80s. Bastfield documents their shared circumstances: both were older siblings from poor, single-parent households, with “fathers no more than a question mark, with barely a face to associate.” Both were also fiercely ambitious and dedicated to their music, first competing against each other in informal schoolyard challenges, and eventually joining forces. Bastfield gives a detailed chronology of the two years he and Shakur shared (the author graduated before Shakur), and the concerns and social activities that filled their days. A portrait of Baltimore also emerges—a gritty, harsh place where citizens struggle to hold their community together; indeed, the city is more vivid than Shakur himself. The rap star remains a cipher, his voice muted. Bastfield mentions the countless hours the two spent together, but even in high school, the author says, “my attempts to figure out my new subject were compromised by a veil that hovered about him.” Fifteen years later, no fresh revelations are available. The work is, instead, Bastfield’s story of high school, as it related to his charismatic and inscrutable friend. The work assumes a working knowledge of Shakur’s entertainment career; his professional accomplishments are mentioned only in passing. Bastfield’s prose oozes sincerity, but his exuberant phrasing plays fast and loose with standard phrasing.
Exclusively for fans.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-44775-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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