Yet another point of view on the long saga of the Stones, this memoir reads like it has an agenda to tick off.
Long-suffering rock-’n’-roll wife spills the dirt on life inside the world’s longest-running musical circus.
When Pamela Des Barres, the world’s most famous groupie, published her tell-some biography I’m With The Band in 1987, it opened the floodgates on a spate of titillating autobiographies from the likes of Bebe Buell, Pattie Boyd and Angela Bowie. The problem—in this case, the world of the Rolling Stones—is that plying these kinds of name-droppers against serious tomes like Stanley Booth’s fantastic The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (1985) or even Keith Richards’ superb autobiography Life (2010) can be more than revealing about their true intent. This time, we hear from former model and entrepreneur Jo Wood, who recounts 30-odd years as the girlfriend and subsequent wife of Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. Wood keeps it light for the first half of the book, describing the enormity of the Stones in their heyday and the gossamer madness of living inside the world’s biggest band. Sure, there are a few groaners: “It’s no wonder that sex and rock 'n’ roll go together like Jack Daniel’s and coke.” But her descriptions of the drug abuse she both suffered and enabled are startling graphic—e.g., the moment the author describes seeing the sun shining through Ronnie’s deviated septum. The guitarist, unsurprisingly, comes off as a grade-A narcissist who cheated on his wife with a bevy of beauties that included Kelly LeBrock and Ekaterina Ivanova. As the author began to build success with her own organic products, she made a breakthrough decades in the making: “In Ronnie’s eyes, I think there was room for just one star in the family—and that was Ronnie Wood.” There are a few gems here for Stones completists, but Wood’s story lacks the pathos of similar autobiographies like Marianne Faithfull’s.
Yet another point of view on the long saga of the Stones, this memoir reads like it has an agenda to tick off.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-228061-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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