A smart set of suggestions for further reading, viewing, and listening by a most trustworthy guide.
The doyen of rock journalists serves up a book of lists of favorite moments in pop culture over the last seven years.
The author’s lists, written for publications such as Rolling Stone, the Barnes & Noble Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, take in movies, books, news reports, and other sources of material. The author of the indispensable Invisible Republic, which examines the centuries-old roots of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Marcus remains a Dylan fanatic. That much is evident from his frequent mentions of Dylan performances, official releases, bootlegs, interviews, and other ephemera. Not all are good: The author calls Dylan’s “nadir” the period from 1978 to the early 1990s, “when Dylan reinvented himself onstage as a lead guitar player and went back to the ballads and blues of his first discovery of folk music with Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong.” Marcus is fascinated by Dylan’s dirgelike 2020 song “Murder Most Foul,” which he rightly pegs as “a seventeen-minute fever dream of the first Kennedy assassination.” The author also devotes much attention to Seattle punk trio Sleater-Kinney, whose founder, Carrie Brownstein, is a multiple threat—musician, actor, author, and screenwriter. Marcus isn’t overly political, but neither is he shy of excoriating Donald Trump, often in the words of others, as when he cites Taylor Swift’s nicely direct comment, “We will vote you out in November.” While Marcus is largely in recommendation mode, it’s not all positive. For example, he calls Marianne Faithfull’s Negative Capability, a “poor, forced album,” like “Lana Del Rey before she was born and after she’s outlived a lot of the people who bought her records.” Still, the author’s enthusiasms win out, whether for a Don DeLillo novel or a Henry Rollins live show. He closes with a provocation: Why aren't the Shangri-Las in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
A smart set of suggestions for further reading, viewing, and listening by a most trustworthy guide.Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-300-26098-4
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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