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MIDNIGHT LIGHTNING

Name: MIDNIGHT LIGHTNING
Author: Greg Tate
ISBN: 1-55652-469-2

JIMI HENDRIX AND THE BLACK EXPERIENCE

by Greg Tate ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2003

Tate wanders over the Hendrix landscape everywhere and in awe, offering a cerebral and gingery reminder of his subject’s...

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A jumpy, fast-talking take on Jimi Hendrix—the social meaning, the sexual mystery, and the music of a “musician’s musician.”

“Race, sex, technology, and Jimi Hendrix—these will position the coordinates on this star map,” explains music journalist Tate (Everything But the Burden, not reviewed). Hendrix was super-elevated for the author, “a living embodiment of all our racial fears, romantic fantasies, otherworldly dreams, and radical desires,” and the writer’s spellbound pyrotechnics can tend at once toward hagiography and hyperbole. Did Hendrix, asks Tate, embody our racial fears, or was he a shape-shifter who could shred racial shibboleths, receiving exceptional “treatment from whites because he was not perceived as a political threat . . . traveled in white company, drew a white crowd, kept a white band, and, oh yeah, bedazzled the Hostiles in a field considered a white man’s province”? Was the inventive life force he found in the Fender Strat based in rhythm and blues, soul, and jazz, or was it a fiery marriage of storefront gospel singer, barwalking saxophonist, and Delta blues? Tate makes Hendrix into a fascinating lawbreaker and Rosetta stone, liquid and languid, “a supersignifier of Post-Liberate Black Consciousness,” possibly “what life as a Black Man without fear of a white planet might look like, feel like, taste like.” Erotic, destructive, chaotic, yet a gentleman too, sartorially definitive, and, oh boy, a musician who could play a loud bolthole to the cosmic, “except [that] the ecumenical Hendrix wanted to pursue a path to cosmos that would be accessible to the average American Pop fan.” Tate is smart and playful, speculating on what might have been if the wine and sleeping pills hadn’t done their work, crafting “some Borgesian fluff for this occasion, confections turned fictions.”

Tate wanders over the Hendrix landscape everywhere and in awe, offering a cerebral and gingery reminder of his subject’s social and musical revolution. (4 b&w photos)

Pub Date: July 1, 2003

ISBN: 1-55652-469-2

Page Count: 176

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003

Categories:

- IN THE NEWS
Critic and Author Greg Tate Has Died at 64

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)