There’s plenty of material, both in this book and from the decades the author doesn’t cover, to suggest that a full-scale...
A memoir of sorts by the late Memphis musical legend.
Dickinson (1941-2009) may not be a household name, but in those households where he is, he is revered: session pianist for the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and other luminaries; producer for Ry Cooder, the Replacements, and Alex Chilton; patriarch of the North Mississippi Allstars. He’s also a world-class storyteller, from the evidence here, a mix of homespun philosophy, hipster poetry, ribald anecdotes, and humanizing reminiscences about pretty much everyone who was anyone in Southern musical circles, from stars to “the Bullet,” a black quadriplegic who would be carried onstage during an R&B revue to the chants of the white audience, “Bring on the Bullet, Bring on the Bullet!” Writes the author, “surely, he hated the audience that called his phantom name. He blew them away with screams from hell, like a dragon breathing fire. His howl’s burning sound seared the audience’s soul in a moment of ultimate release.” Such visceral detail and emotional intensity distinguishes Dickinson’s writing, as it did his playing and approach to production. He also recalls his theater days at Baylor, his visual art, his formative musical years in Memphis, his marriage to the love of his life, and his extended session work with the Dixie Flyers, a band that was largely dysfunctional in terms of vices and personalities but often came together much better in the studio. Here’s how the author remembers his introduction to rockabilly’s Ronnie Hawkins, whose comeback bid the Flyers would back: “A man among men. Hawkins got off the plane in Muscle Shoals with a cardboard box full of liquor bottles and a woman who looked like a cross between a Playboy bunny and a serial killer.” Unfortunately, the memoir pretty much ends in the early 1970s, with the release of his largely ignored solo debut and co-production of the second Cooder album.
There’s plenty of material, both in this book and from the decades the author doesn’t cover, to suggest that a full-scale biography is overdue.Pub Date: April 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4968-1054-0
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
bookshelf
