An overwhelmingly sad and consistently vulgar anthology.
Rehashed tales of rock ’n’ roll excess prove that even the most powerfully creative voices in music can be tone deaf about drug addiction.
And so it goes. Johnny Cash loses it in Nickajack Cave, Ozzy Osbourne snorts up a bunch of ants, and Lemmy slips into premature rigor mortis. The lives of drug-addled recording artists over the last 50 years or so have been nothing if not predictably awful—and, unfortunately, cliché. Editor Hoye takes a steadfastly permissive approach, presenting the collection of coked-out confessionals without benefit of outside commentary or context; the pieces are merely excerpts from previous books. The likes of Aerosmith, Marilyn Manson, Slash, Dee Dee Ramone, Gregg Allman, and Anthony Kiedis drone on about how the pills and the smack drove them to the depths of depravity and degradation and back again. In one instance, Nikki Sixx and Osbourne seemed locked in a battle to become the most repulsive human being on tour. Osbourne won. In another all-too-familiar case, Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Kiedis details how heroin actually cost him his multimillion-dollar gig. Heroine also looms large in the tawdry and twisted lives of multiple members of Guns N’ Roses. Aerosmith’s insufferable exploits at an out-of-the-way recording studio dubbed the Cenacle in the late 1970s are equal parts toxic and tedious. Only the late Cash seems to possess any self-awareness about the well-trodden road he’s traveled. “The journey into addiction has been described so often by so many people in recent years that I don’t believe a blow-by-blow account of my particular path would serve any useful purpose,” he writes, “…so while I do have to tell you about it, I’ll try to avoid being tedious. Hit just the lowlights, so to speak.” Alas, these rock stars and their copycat crackups are more gross than glorious.
An overwhelmingly sad and consistently vulgar anthology.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944713-03-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lesser Gods
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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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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