Following several attempts at a reunion, the band died with Van Zant and three other band members in a plane crash in 1977,...
One for the fans as Odom, security manager for Lynyrd Skynyrd and longtime buddy of lead man Ronnie Van Zant, chronicles the boozy ascent and abrupt crash of the hugely popular band.
They certainly burned bright for a few years, with a “hellfire boogie played at a quickfire pace.” In this admiring biography, Odom follows the band through its early manifestations as the Noble Five and the One Percent, playing gigs off the back of a flatbed truck at church socials while adding and subtracting members. This was a bunch of gents who liked fishing, fighting, girls, and singing: rednecks and proud of it. But, Odom says, they—and Van Zant in particular—were perfectionists, rehearsing and noodling with their songs until they ultimately attracted the attention of Al Kooper, who further helped shape their sound. Sketches are afforded of each of the band members and a good number of their entourage, but it’s Van Zant who commands Odom’s affection. A talented songwriter who made the most of his limited vocal skills, Van Zant was a Jekyll-and-Hyde drinker, unpredictably violent when drunk (and drunk most of the time, as were most of the band members). Yet, despite all the drinking before the shows, the band had enormous stage presence, and their neatly choreographed performances crackled with energy. Odom bravely tries to make a case for their distinctiveness within Southern rock (including the Allman Brothers, ZZ Top, Marshall Tucker), but it was their knack for “quotation music”—carefully measured appropriations of Hendrix, Clapton, Jethro Tull, and others the band respected—that steams off the page here, second only to their gift for hellraising.
Following several attempts at a reunion, the band died with Van Zant and three other band members in a plane crash in 1977, an accident handled with tact here and easily the most disturbing and electrifying part of this tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd. (Photographs)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-1026-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
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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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