A deeply candid look into the life and times of a talented artist.
Jim Croce’s widow finally opens up about living, loving and making music with her late pop-star husband.
Before he was tragically killed in a 1973 plane crash while on tour, Croce commanded the radio airwaves. In the early ’70s, hits like “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," “Operator” and “Time in a Bottle” made the singer-songwriter appear like an overnight sensation. In reality, it took him many years of heartache and struggle to crack the top of the charts, and Ingrid was with him every step of the way, both as a musical collaborator and a devoted wife. The couple’s profound love for one another, first ignited when Jim was still in college and Ingrid was just 16, is infused into every one of these intimate pages. Her husband’s premature death was a nightmare to all who knew him and loved his music. For Ingrid, the tragedy actually began well before he ever climbed into that doomed airplane. At some point (which Ingrid traces to a horrific incident she experienced while on vacation), Jim began to change in ways that are almost as sad, frustrating and unfathomable as his untimely demise. She recounts the many betrayals and transgressions in a heartbreaking voice. This warts-and-all portrait paints Jim as a profoundly conflicted man who might have gotten his act together had he been given the time—but maybe not. For almost 40 years, fans curious about Jim have had to satisfy themselves with his wonderful songs, but now we have a more complete picture of the man behind the music.
A deeply candid look into the life and times of a talented artist.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-306-82121-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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