by Farah Jasmine Griffin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2001
A wide-ranging reassessment of Holiday’s work, best suited for Lady Day admirers.
An erudite fan attempts to reconstruct the life of singer Billie Holiday in a more positive light, by deconstructing her previous biographies.
Lady Day, who died more than 30 years ago, remains a romantic, tragic icon to jazz buffs. A Holiday devotee since childhood, Griffin (Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends, 1999) offers an analysis that seeks to revise the singer’s image as victimized drug addict. Against the critics who contend that it was merely natural-born talent that led to Holiday’s success, Griffin argues that she was a disciplined, insightful musician who worked hard at her art. Holiday’s hapless public image has been shaped largely by her drug arrests and her autobiography (Lady Sings the Blues, later made into a film starring Diana Ross). Although Holiday collaborated in creating that myth, Griffin calls her “too complex to be contained by the tragic victim narrative.” Instead, she is depicted here as a worthy foremother for black women, compelling not only for her “musical genius” but also for her public dignity, courage, and determination. Moreover, she did not represent “maid, mammy or mother,” as black women usually did in the 1940s and ’50s. The author revisits familiar as well as more obscure biographies, magazine articles, documentaries, and recordings for evidence to shore up her arguments. She covers Holiday’s European experiences and reviews her appeal to both poets (the book title is taken from a poem by Rita Dove) and marketers of upscale products. A lengthy chapter is also devoted to actress/singer/poet Abbey Lincoln, seen admiringly as one of Holiday’s beneficiaries (as were Peggy Lee, Lena Horne, and such contemporary performers as Erykah Badu and Mary J. Blige). Classic photographs of Holiday—including the memorable Lady with the gardenia portrait—lead each chapter. There are also extensive endnotes, plus a list of recommended reading and listening.
A wide-ranging reassessment of Holiday’s work, best suited for Lady Day admirers.Pub Date: May 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86808-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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