An uneven but charmingly eccentric memoir detailing a bassist’s martial arts journey.
A rock musician chronicles his adventures at a taekwondo dojo in Texas.
Blair’s debut book is a whirlwind through his broad range of experiences and eclectic interests. He is primarily known as a bassist for the alternative rock band the Toadies, whom readers may know for their 1994 hit “Possum Kingdom.” But while Blair recounts his escapades with the band on the road throughout the work, the memoir mainly discusses the author’s love of martial arts. After settling with his wife in Amarillo, Texas, Blair decided to get in better shape by picking up a passion from his past: taekwondo. He takes the reader on a tour of the limited dojo offerings throughout the city before settling on a World Taekwondo Federation dojang led by a coach for the U.S. Olympic team. Shortly thereafter, Blair was a white belt in his early 40s, sparring with teenagers far above his skill level, getting regular lessons in humility. The author writes in a wandering, conversational tone that can be digressive and difficult to follow at times. Occasionally, he includes personal critiques of his younger sparring partners that can seem oddly vindictive, but most of the time the narrative voice is amusing despite the excess of superfluous anecdotes. Once Blair settles into his dojang, he takes the reader through his growing obsession with taekwondo. He acquired equipment, trained constantly, and slowly won the respect and friendship of his more experienced peers in his quest to attain a black belt. Along the way, he learned a clichéd but heartwarming lesson about the philosophical value of martial arts: “Knowing kicks and punches is not what keeps us protected. It’s the values and the self-control that allow us to live life and be better people.” In addition to Toadies fans, this account should please readers looking for a lighthearted foray into a strange pocket of American culture: Texan taekwondo.
An uneven but charmingly eccentric memoir detailing a bassist’s martial arts journey.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59439-539-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: YMAA Publication Center
Review Posted Online: June 14, 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
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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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