An entertaining, memorable look at “the most intractable paradox of all: punk as a positive force in society.”
The songwriter, lead singer, and sole constant member of the iconic punk band Bad Religion delivers a well-crafted memoir and manifesto.
“Formidable we were not,” writes Graffin. “But something was shared among all punk rockers outside of Hollywood: we were hated.” That hatred bonded those late-1970s–era kids in a torn-jeans, leather-jacketed united front against the yuppies, surf Nazis, and police officers who hunted for them. It also provided Graffin with both material and inspiration that informed Bad Religion, which he formed in 1980. The author was no ordinary punker, however: He took time off from the band to go to college and graduate school, though he did delay his doctorate in paleontology by going out on tour. Now a professor of evolution at Cornell as well as a working musician and author of Population Wars and Anarchy Evolution, Graffin takes a decidedly Darwinian view about business. “Never reveal to your competition what your true talent is,” he writes, “until that moment when you really need it to prove your superiority and leave the others dumbfounded and defeated, realizing that they had been victims of their own hubris, that you had been toying with them all along.” That ethos served him well when he took his young band out on the road, learning along the way that punk rockers created punk rock more than the other way around and that the genre was a wonderful expression of angst and discontentment channeled into something better than drugs or alcohol. Unusually, Graffin expresses solidarity with the hippies who preceded (and were reviled by) the punks, and he even has sympathetic words for the hair metal bands of Sunset Strip, who never got beaten up by the LAPD as much as the punks did.
An entertaining, memorable look at “the most intractable paradox of all: punk as a positive force in society.”Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-306-92458-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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