A rare glimpse into the color guard lifestyle with personal touches that rescue the book from becoming pure pageantry.
Chandler’s debut memoir takes readers behind the scenes of the little-understood world of color guard.
The author’s story begins in a small Southern town, where his classmates routinely bullied him with a “constant barrage” of homophobic slurs. The author’s passion for performance, though, helped him flower, and after he watched a marching band on television, he was inspired by its precision and power. He learned the trombone and soon became heavily involved in the college color guard. As Chandler describes becoming a director and eventually leading his corps to several championships, it’s evident that he’s very good at what he does. He frames his narrative with an anecdote about the musical TV show Glee, whose producers hired him to choreograph a scene: “Here I was, a part of bringing color guard to a musical television show about a group of kids who were alienated as outsiders in high school.” He later met Stanley Knaub, a renowned choreographer, who playfully called Chandler the “Pixie from Dixie.” Color guard is an art form that requires a lot of discipline, and Chandler offers a surprisingly candid perspective on it: “It’s all show business….There’s an audience that has paid good money to come and see you and you have something to communicate.” This book is an all-encompassing autobiography, narrating the full arc of the author’s life and work. The prose style can be dry and uneven. At its best, though, it has the glossy, appreciative tone of a commencement speech, offering an equal mix of sweet anecdotes and life lessons. In a late chapter, “Putting it Together,” the story transforms into a manifesto about the creative process, and the next, “Dear Performers…,” is an open letter to his mentees. Although Chandler writes that he didn’t know how to finish the book, his finale is particularly sentimental. Alienated youths with a creative streak will likely find inspiration in this story.
A rare glimpse into the color guard lifestyle with personal touches that rescue the book from becoming pure pageantry.Pub Date: June 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5119-6033-5
Page Count: 242
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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