Crosses the line from admiring Marley to uncritical celebrity worship.
Chronological birth-to-death sketch of Jamaica’s premier musician.
St. Kitts-based journalist Steckles, one of the reggae icon’s more devout devotees, has spent countless moons cataloging all forms of Bob Marley minutiae. From an overview of Wailers’ producer Lee “Scratch” Perry and his notorious royalty rip-offs to a reexamination of the night Marley took a bullet in the arm from an unknown assassin, Steckles squeezes in all the necessary info for Zion Lion neophytes without revealing anything immensely fresh. Even an epilogue about Marley’s legacy is basically a collated update of all the lawsuits levied against the estate. The only reasons for yet another book about Bob Marley seem to be that 1) there’s a movie about him coming out soon, and 2) Steckles really wanted to write about him. Make no mistake, this debut author can turn a phrase. Yet he passed up a great opportunity to look beyond the hype about a stoic “prophet” and tap into Marley’s inner thoughts, motivations and, yes, even his flaws. The volume often reads like a discography, brimming over with excellent trivia. Regrettably, this detailed information is padded every few pages with fanzine-style gushing like calling Marley “one of the smartest human beings on the planet” and stating that he achieved more acclaim than the Beatles and Elvis.
Crosses the line from admiring Marley to uncritical celebrity worship.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56656-733-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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