Not likely to be the “definitive biography” of U2, but Jobling provides a passable comprehensive history of the members’...
Unauthorized biography of U2, one of the most respected and admired yet divisive acts in the history of rock.
Sometimes, the divisiveness stems from the same roots as the respect; some people find the band’s frank embrace of politics empowering and noble while others find it preachy and sanctimonious. Where some see spectacle, others see bombast. British journalist Jobling explores the lives and careers of the band members: lead singer and most visible member Bono, lead guitarist The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. The four met as schoolboys and made a slow, steady climb through Dublin’s music scene, eventually rising first to regional prominence and eventually to global dominance. Along the way, three of the members, all except Clayton, took part in a Charismatic Christian church that engaged in the speaking of tongues. At times, each of them partook in the excesses of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and, to varying degrees, embraced a political mission that would come to define them, especially frontman Bono, nearly as much as their music. The band has a reputation for keeping tight control of their image, which might explain the unauthorized nature of the book. While this frees Jobling to be critical of a variety of subjects concerning the band—e.g., its absurdly high ticket prices and corporate ties—it also proves restrictive since the band doesn’t get the opportunity to respond to some of the more prurient charges that the author, via his interview subjects, levels against them. Indeed, at times, those subjects seem to relish the chance to grind axes, especially in the second half of the book.
Not likely to be the “definitive biography” of U2, but Jobling provides a passable comprehensive history of the members’ music, politics, faith and group dynamics.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-02789-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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