A roadie’s engaging and often amusing memoir of life in the eye of the punk rock storm. Green, who served the Clash as road manager from their commercial breakthrough in England in 1977 through their emergence as an international colossus in 1980 or so, lets it all hang out, giving his fond remembrances of life on the road and in the studios. While Green was with the Clash, the band’s fortunes skyrocketed (quite coincidentally, the author gently contends). All through this account, we see the four band members in their unvarnished glory—vain, dope-smoking, lazy (except when it came to writing, recording, and playing music), curious, and terribly irresponsible with money. Yet despite such facts, Green’s slightly nostalgia-tinted memories will serve to further endear the Clash to their fans. As described here, we see the band as innovators and agitators and decent blokes. We also get a deft account of the creative process at work, of how the band extracted great music from ordinary experiences and sensations. Without excessively touting his influence on band members, Green (aided by British freelance writer Barker) reveals how his presence gently affected them: he introduced them to the music of country guitar legend Joe Ely (who opened for them on a leg of their 1980 US tour), for instance. Also evident is how other musicians of the punk era—Sid Vicious, John Lydon, the Dead Boys, Souixie Sue (who seldom comes off well in this type of retrospective), and others lesser known—affected the Clash and their music, for better or worse. That the Clash’s music is now known mostly as soundtrack fodder or as an influence for current acts makes the timing of this book most curious indeed. Better late than never!
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-571-19957-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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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