A better-than-average up-from-the-ghetto, as-told-to life story by the R&B diva. Born Jamesetta Hawkins in 1938 in Los Angeles, her remarkable voice won her a featured soloist spot at the local church when she was just a child, and she'd barely hit her teens when she was discovered by L.A. promoter/songwriter Johnny Otis, a Greek man whose soul ``was blacker than the blackest black in Compton.'' Otis gave Etta her stage name and oversaw the recording of her first hit: ``Roll With Me, Henry,'' a double-entendre answer song to the Hank Ballard hit, ``Work With Me, Annie.'' From there, she hit the road, mostly playing small southern towns where she encountered racism at every turn. Her pungent observations about her peers make for amusing reading: Little Richard ``called himself King Richard and would get mad if you didn't recognize his royalty''; James Brown was ``a little dictator, an arrogant lord over the world of his music''; Jackie Wilson ``was incapable of talking about anything but Jackie.'' James also chronicles her regrettable talent for selecting men who used her at best, physically abused her at worst, and an addiction to heroin and other drugs that took her decades to shake. Musically speaking, James's life has also been one of ups and downs. Never quite achieving mainstream success, she moved from pure R&B to light jazz, pop standards, and out-and-out rock 'n' roll in the late '60s and '70s, then returned to form as a funky blues shouter in the '80s. James is well served by coauthor Ritz (Take It Off, Take It All Off, 1993, etc.), who ably captures the singer's feisty tone and does a reasonable job of keeping the narrative moving along. Not exactly an uplifting story, but plenty of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll to keep the fans happy. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42328-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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