Sister Rosetta deserves better than this sleepy, uncritical tome.
Guitar-wielding gospel grande dame gets her first full-length biography.
Though Sister Rosetta Tharpe definitely had an impact on many rock guitarists, the book’s subtitle is marketing sleight-of-hand. Tharpe wasn’t a rock-’n’-roller—she was a holy roller, a Pentecostal shouter and refined picker who was one of the top sacred-music performers of her day. It’s true that she see-sawed between the gospel and secular worlds: 1930s releases like “Rock Me” and “This Train” were church roof-raisers, but she was soon recording with Lucky Millinder’s big band and playing decidedly ungodly venues like New York’s Cotton Club and Café Society. She returned to the gospel road in the mid-’40s, and her career didn’t recover until her embrace by European blues revivalists in the ’60s; she died in 1973, at age 58. Sister Rosetta’s fascinating experiences fail to come alive in this lugubrious narrative. Wald (English/George Washington Univ.) is madly in love with her subject and treats with rapture even such grotesque incidents as Tharpe’s 1951 wedding before a paid crowd of 20,000 in a Washington ballpark. Though based on dozens of interviews, her work reads more like a full-length mash note than a carefully researched biography. The reader learns little about Tharpe’s three husbands, even though the third—Russell Morrison—was her manager for nearly 20 years. Old rumors about bisexuality are mentioned, only to be quickly dismissed. Wald writes virtually nothing about how Tharpe learned to play or from whom, neglecting the historical roots of her dazzling guitar style. Nor does the author have anything to say about the essential, abiding conflict between Tharpe’s sacred and worldly sides.
Sister Rosetta deserves better than this sleepy, uncritical tome.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-8070-0984-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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