Equally reminiscent of Samuel Fuller’s filmed melodramas, Springsteen’s “My Hometown,” and Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls...
A humorous yet unsettling look back at a minor-league grifter family in a major-league crooked town—pre-reform Jersey City.
Stapinski’s debut invokes sensitive questions about class, domesticity, and the tolerance of corruption essential to machine politics. She artfully reconstructs her hardscrabble 1970s childhood above a tavern, and her close-knit, rambunctious family, entangled by the graft-ridden Hudson County government (her mother worked for the DMV, and an aunt was a longtime “fixer”). But to a large degree she portrays her family, like her native city, as cursed—and she explores veins of darkness behind the hearty façade: the community’s reliance on stolen goods (and the endorsement of criminality that implied), her taciturn father’s dependence on alcohol, and the violence embodied by a hate-filled grandfather (whose madness was tolerated in the community until he tried to murder members of his own family). Throughout, Stapinski uses her family-based narrative to portray an urban political culture that encouraged theft, election fraud, industrial pollution, and a looting of the tax base, while pacifying underclass residents with city-payroll jobs and mob-mentality hedonism. Along the way, she constructs a vivid picture of pre-gentrification Jersey City: a “scary” place where teenagers attended decaying movie palaces, the streets were full of deformed pencil-sellers and midget news-dealers, stolen goods were sold in the municipal buildings, and loose joints and “the numbers” were available on any street corner. Although evoking the crowded, colloquial feel of “outsider” writing, the author has a fine sense of narrative line and of relevant observation; as a result, her work simultaneously captures the street-level conviviality of the urban working class, and the desperation and violence lurking beneath.
Equally reminiscent of Samuel Fuller’s filmed melodramas, Springsteen’s “My Hometown,” and Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls (1999), this is an unusual and relevant urban family history.Pub Date: March 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-46306-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
An intriguing look at an iconoclast’s cultural accomplishments.
Beloved, controversial performer discusses fame and the deeper meanings of his life.
Common, subject of Fox News’ ire following his White House poetry recitation, has long been acclaimed as a thoughtful and deft hip-hop artist. In his memoir—co-authored by Bradley (Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, 2009, etc.)—he suggests great consciousness of the cultural legacy he carries: “Chicago blackness gave me understanding, awareness, street sense, and a rhythm. I learned the way that soulful people move, act, and talk.” He portrays himself as an openhearted, curious kid, trying to understand the tumult of Chicago’s African-American South Side. Obsessed with girls from an early age, he would go to the city’s museums to meet them. At the same time, he was rhyming in private, and he gave up basketball in high school to concentrate on rap, which he saw as similarly competitive. Common writes frankly about his youthful involvement with gang culture, portrayed as an inevitable rite of passage that became increasingly violent: “Crack hit the South Side of Chicago like a balled up fist.” Varied influences—his mother, friends, artistic ambitions—steered him away from it and toward a more “conscious” existence. By 1989, his early demos as Common Sense were drawing industry attention, and he dropped out of college to pursue this calling, over his mother’s objections. Much of what follows is a funny, honest showbiz narrative, moving from hip-hop to film acting. Interestingly, each chapter begins with a “letter” to someone significant in his life: e.g., his mother and father (early chapters discuss their tumultuous relationship), Emmett Till, former girlfriend Erykah Badu and collaborator Kanye West. Additionally, his mother offers occasional italicized counterpoint. As a memoir, the book succeeds based on Common’s candor, intelligence and charm, despite occasional artificial passages and broad platitudes, and he writes powerfully about his connection with President Obama.
An intriguing look at an iconoclast’s cultural accomplishments.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2587-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.
An exhaustive—and exhausting—chronicle of the champ's boxing career and disastrous life.
Tyson was dealt an unforgiving hand as a child, raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in a "horrific, tough and gruesome" environment populated by "loud, aggressive" people who "smelled like raw sewage.” A first-grade dropout with several break-ins under his belt by age 7, his formal education resumed when he was placed in juvenile detention at age 11, but the lesson he learned at home was to do absolutely anything to survive. Two years later, his career path was set when he met legendary boxing trainer Cus D'Amato. However, Tyson’s temperament never changed; if anything, it hardened when he took on the persona of Iron Mike, a merciless and savage fighter who became undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. By his own admission, he was an "arrogant sociopath" in and out of the ring, and he never reconciled his thuggish childhood with his adult self—nor did he try. He still partied with pimps, drug addicts and hustlers, and he was determined to feed all of his vices and fuel several drug addictions at the cost of his freedom (he recounts his well-documented incarcerations), sanity and children. Yet throughout this time, he remained a voracious reader, and he compares himself to Clovis and Charlemagne and references Camus, Sartre, Mao Zedong and Nietzsche's "Overman" in casual conversation. Tyson is a slumdog philosopher whose insatiable appetites have ruined his life many times over. He remains self-loathing and pitiable, and his tone throughout the book is sardonic, exasperated and indignant, his language consistently crude. The book, co-authored by Sloman (co-author: Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of Kiss, 2012, etc.), reads like his journal; he updated it after reading the galleys and added "A Postscript to the Epilogue" as well.
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16128-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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