Of minor interest to Mr. Wonder’s legion of fans.
Two journalists superficially chronicle the life of musician Stevie Wonder’s mother.
Born in 1932 in Hurtsboro, Alabama, and abandoned shortly thereafter by her unmarried teenage mother, Lula Hardaway was raised by a maternal aunt and uncle. They died when she was about 12 years old; at 13, she made a long train trip to Chicago to live with the father she had never met. Their reunion lasted two weeks. Hardaway next went to stay with a paternal aunt in Indiana, where she was put to work as a seamstress in a local textile mill. Pregnant and unmarried at 14, she was thrown out of the house. Once again she relocated to a relative’s home, this time in Michigan. There, 17-year-old Hardaway met Calvin Judkins, a street hustler in his 50s. They married and quickly had two children; younger son Steveland was born prematurely, and his infant blindness may have been the result of too much oxygen in the incubator. Family life was far from idyllic: Judkins soon began pimping and battering Hardaway. During one such incident, she attacked him with a knife and made her escape to Detroit. At this point (the late 1950s), the narrative virtually abandons Hardaway, and focuses on Wonder’s pivotal relationship with Berry Gordy Jr. and his long association with Motown Records. This story is always engaging, but has been amply covered already: his first big hit (“Fingertips-Pt 2”) in 1963; the influential albums Uptight Everything’s Alright, Innervisions, and the spectacular Songs in the Key of Life; his joyful creation of pop history. Oddly, it ends with Wonder’s triumph at the 1974 Grammy Awards; Love and Brown bring Hardaway’s life story up to date in a two-page epilogue. Although the authors note that her chief motivation in cooperating with this project is to empower other despairing women, they do her a disservice in this shallow biography.
Of minor interest to Mr. Wonder’s legion of fans.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-86979-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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