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
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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