A savvy reminiscence of the era when punk finally paid its debt to society.
Straightforward account of the improbably profitable second coming of punk rock.
British music journalist Winwood (co-author: Into the Black: The Inside Story of Metallica (1991-2014), 2014, etc.) writes with authoritative enthusiasm about the 1990s rise of bands like Green Day and the Offspring and their broader relationship to the always-contentious question, “what is punk?” He argues that since their success, “anyone forming a punk band did so with the knowledge that in doing so it was possible to become suddenly wealthy.” Setting up this improbable cultural watershed, the author briefly covers the initial blast of 1970s and ’80s punk, when powerful bands like Black Flag and the Germs had momentum cut short by police hostility, drug abuse, and changing underground rock trends. So, when bands like Los Angeles’ initially mediocre NOFX and the Bay Area’s beloved Operation Ivy (which morphed into Rancid) and juvenile upstarts Green Day formed, they had little expectation of mainstream success despite the signing explosion following Nirvana’s breakthrough in 1991. As NOFX’s Fat Mike recalls of those lean days, “It was fine because we didn’t know any different and no one bitched about it.” Still, the hardy pre-internet infrastructure of small labels, regional fanzines, and college radio meant that bands could tour and release records, improving their chops beneath the mainstream radar. This was epitomized by Bad Religion co-founder Brett Gurewitz’s Epitaph Records, eventually hugely influential but run on a shoestring during the years when, as band mate Greg Graffin recalls, “the punk scene was completely dismantled.” All this had started to change when Green Day’s commercial breakthrough, “Dookie,” catapulted them into the mainstream, bringing mass attention to the reconstituted punk genre. Winwood captures the halcyon days that followed, which included huge tours, Epitaph’s lucrative prominence, and Green Day’s later triumph with “American Idiot.” Focusing on the personalities behind these epochal bands, the author stays more on the surface than other recent assessments, but his knowing humor will appeal to younger fans and those who were there.
A savvy reminiscence of the era when punk finally paid its debt to society.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-306-90274-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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