An exhaustive treatment—an absolute trove for those with an Airplane itch—of what in retrospect was an exhilarating, but...
An intriguing composite picture of Jefferson Airplane and its many permutations.
Global Rhythm magazine editor Tamarkin doesn’t claim to be speaking the gospel of the Airplane here, but instead he offers a chronological pastiche of the personalities and events associated with the rock group. Sprinkling this account with short comments from the band members and others in its orbit, he writes a lively, detail-strewn history of the legendary band and how it took, with a vengeance, to the electricity of San Francisco in the mid-1960s. The politics of the Bay Area at that time don’t play much of a role in the story, but Tamarkin's tale leans heavily toward music, sex, and drugs, not insignificant forces by any means. He captures the swirling energy the band generated: its insistence to go its own way, particularly when confronted by music industry executives; the delirious performances at the Fillmore; the creation of the great album art and concert posters; Grace Slick’s on- and offstage intensity; the wicked frictions that came with the group’s constant game of musical beds; its musical shift from pastel to darkness; how it turned Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark on their ears; the crazywild lifestyle that finally led to fistfights, gunplay, and death at Altamont. Tamarkin also reminds readers that the band members were assertive and inspired musicians who went on to play with a wide variety of bands, constantly reinventing themselves, through Jefferson Starship and Hot Tuna to the unfortunate 1989 reunion, which Rolling Stone dubbed the “most unwelcome comeback of the year.” The players were incandescent, professionally and personally, and their behavior left an endless string of anecdotes, from the joyous to the really ugly, from the Summer of Love to a drunken Slick pointing a gun at police officers.
An exhaustive treatment—an absolute trove for those with an Airplane itch—of what in retrospect was an exhilarating, but also awfully exhausting, time.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-671-03403-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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