Wareham may not demonstrate the sharpest narrative focus, but his memoir is refreshingly confident and unsentimental in its...
Indie-rock icon recalls life in the studio and on the road.
Wareham begins with a chronicle of his childhood and early adult life. Born in New Zealand, his family moved to New York City in 1977. While attending the exclusive Dalton School, he frequented CBGB’s, Irving Plaza, the Palladium and other venues, catching performances by the Clash, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Pere Ubu, Television and many others. In 1981, Wareham enrolled at Harvard and soon after started his first band, Speedy and the Castanets: “[We] sucked. We were clueless and talentless. And yet we felt we were the only interesting band on campus. So what if we couldn’t play? If nothing else, we had our arrogance.” Such sentiment colors most of the narrative, as the author offers frequent asides about music, philosophy and the art of performance—some enlightening, others trite, but all unflinchingly honest. On a particularly poor Bob Dylan show: “He had that dolt GE Smith on guitar. GE Smith was the bandleader on Saturday Night Live, and he was best known for making too many rock faces. Maybe his playing would be tolerable if he put a paper bag over his head.” While living in Boston in the early ’80s, guitarist and singer Wareham founded Galaxie 500 with two friends. The band toiled in the small-club scene for a few years and then gradually built a loyal fan base touring across the United States and playing a few international rock festivals, including the Glastonbury Festival in England and Roskilde in Denmark. Though Galaxie 500 eventually developed a cult following, Wareham quit in 1991 and went on to found Luna, the band for which he would become best known. After releasing Lunapark, the band embarked on their first tour, landing an opening slot for the Screaming Trees. A second album, Bewitched, followed, but it was their third album, Penthouse, on which “Luna really hit its stride musically…we had learned to appreciate the subtleties of one another’s playing.” The author provides a highly detailed, if occasionally scattershot, account of his life—including the addition of bassist Britta Phillips (“the best visible panty line in rock”), with whom the author had an affair, then eventually married—and he tosses in enough pointed musical and cultural commentary to satisfy even the most jaded rock-bio fan.
Wareham may not demonstrate the sharpest narrative focus, but his memoir is refreshingly confident and unsentimental in its exploration of life in the indie-rock trenches.Pub Date: March 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-155-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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