HOLDING LIGHTNING

A comprehensive look at the life and career of “the Voice.”

In her excellent biography of Houston, cultural critic Lordi contrasts the legendary singer and actor with other Black cultural innovators, like Nina Simone, writing that Houston “appears not as a visionary but as a femme object we gaze at or gape at, asking what happened to her, not what she did.” She has a point. Houston, despite recording some of the most memorable songs of the late-20th century, has become a cautionary tale to some and a punchline to haters who mock her struggle with substance use. In Lordi’s well-researched book, she traces Houston’s life back to her childhood in New Jersey, the daughter of Cissy Houston, herself a famed singer. As a young woman, the author writes, Whitney Houston smoked pot and did cocaine once in a while but kept it together enough to release a remarkable string of hit singles, including “How Will I Know” and “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)”; she was already a superstar when she starred in The Bodyguard (1992), which spawned her career-defining single a cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” Her fortunes began to decline in the late 1990s, when her escalating drug use and tumultuous marriage to Bobby Brown made her a frequent tabloid target. When she died of an accidental drowning in 2012 at 48, her fans were devastated—but few, sadly, were much surprised. Lordi convincingly makes the argument that Houston didn’t fit into the archetype of “the famous doomed woman whose only agency appears to be the power to self-destruct.” Rather, she writes, Houston was savvy and smart but had burned herself out after years of hard work, giving her all to her art: “She could tend to her own light, or she could fire it up for us, but she could no longer do both.”

A top-notch biography of a generational talent.