by Jay Warner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 12, 2001
Living proof of the healing power of music.
The moving and mind-boggling story of Tennessee jailbird harmonizers Johnny Bragg and the Prisonaires, from music impresario and author Warner (Billboard’s Book of American Singing Groups, not reviewed).
Bragg emerged from dire circumstances and poverty in Nashville to march straight into prison. The year was 1943, and Warner strongly suggests that the charges (six rapes) were trumped up against the illiterate black teenager in what was at the time a routine way for southern lawmen to clear their books of unsolved crimes. Bragg got 594 years. In the slammer, he joined a gospel group to help mitigate the boredom, the ugliness, and the violence of prison life. His tenor was glorious, and singing restored some of his dignity. Neatly braiding story strands involving music, religion, and politics, Warner explains in homey prose how the election of progressive Tennessee governor Frank Clement, who wanted to prove that men could overcome their errors and do good, helped alleviate Johnny’s situation. The Prisonaires played at churches, clubs, all the way up to the governor’s mansion. They recorded a number of songs, including the hit single “Just Walkin’ in the Rain.” Finally, Johnny got paroled, 15 years after he received his life sentence. It would be nice to report that he got a singing contract and all due royalties, but Warner goes on to report that what Johnny got instead was another (evidently) bum rap and another 10 years before he was released. He continued to sing thereafter, but his main gigs were at burial services. He still sings today, having married and attained a measure of security, as well as an unexpected old age. Johnny is quite the storyteller, and Warner makes good use of some terrific anecdotal material about Elvis, an interesting claim regarding Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” and Bragg’s reflections on his strange life.
Living proof of the healing power of music.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2001
ISBN: 1-58063-140-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Renaissance
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
Share your opinion of this book
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.