It would be an overstatement to say that Masekela found grace and redemption through the trumpet—as a bad boy, he wasn’t...
How the South African trumpeter survived his outrageous lifestyle with his liver and brain functions still intact is as miraculous as the sounds his horn makes when he’s in his stride.
Though his debauchery warrants the tone of a confessional—at 17, “my addictions to alcohol and sex were well under way”—Masekela is too bright to leave it at that. He sets his hard-partying life against his growing consciousness of apartheid (he figured Boer women’s scowls simply expressed jealousy because “they had no rhythm, they couldn’t sing or dance, couldn’t play the drums and didn’t know how to laugh”) and his immersion in music at home and abroad. In 1942, three-year-old Hugh was already singing along with American big-band recordings, and when he heard Harry James’s trumpet work in the 1953 film Young Man with a Horn, his life’s course was set. In an unadorned, uninhibited voice, Masekela evokes music’s magical power “to sing our sorrow and illuminate our ecstasy” as he and other black South Africans suffered passbooks, the Bantu Education Act, the immorality laws, and apartheid’s assassins. When he arrived in New York City in 1960, the avant-garde jazz scene was on fire; Dizzy Gillespie sent him down to the Half Note to catch John Coltrane, one of the many Americans who inspired Masekela to create his own fusion sound. He married and divorced too many times to count, created brilliant music for Sarafina!, and toured with Paul Simon; he also became so addled by drugs that family, music, and friends fell away beneath him. On the political front, he reveals his disillusionment upon returning to post-apartheid South Africa and discovering that “we were a long way from freedom and justice”; black government didn’t necessarily equal a better life for Africans.
It would be an overstatement to say that Masekela found grace and redemption through the trumpet—as a bad boy, he wasn’t looking for that—but he sure gave a lot of pleasure.Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-60957-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
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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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