A future country music legend travels with her family from rural America to the ``promised land'' of California, only to find herself embroiled as she grows up in unexpected fame, domestic strife, and teenage pregnancy. The similarity of at least part of this story to The Grapes of Wrath is not lost on journalist Whiteside. Rose's mother, Lula, was, in her way, as determined as Steinbeck's great heroine Ma Joad. She and her husband left Alabama in 1933, walking and hitchhiking to California, with five children in tow. Once there, they found life to be at first little better. It was music that saved them. Rose, born in 1925, was the youngest and from childhood a gifted singer. The iron-willed Lula helped her children form the Maddox Brothers and Rose in 1937, a singing group that enjoyed steady regional (and intermittent national) popularity for 20 years. Following the breakup of the group, Rose, having finally escaped the control of her domineering mother, went on to a successful solo career. Interviewed extensively for this biography, Maddox demonstrates both frankness and true southern charm. She offers salty recollections of her career and her famous contemporaries, including Patsy Cline, who accused her of having more body than talent (``I do not get up there and shake,'' Rose heatedly observes, ``my body keeps time with my singin', is all''), and an enamored Johnny Cash, whom she rebuffed (``And that's when he hired June Carter. . . . You know what happened then''). The record of her life is also a fascinating portrait of the once thriving West Coast country music scene. A somewhat rushed synopsis of the postBritish Invasion years is balanced by a wonderful introduction, a previously unpublished letter about Rose and her brothers written in 1949 by folk giant Woody Guthrie. A solid biography, and a welcome addition to the history of modern American popular music. (50 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-8265-1269-0
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Vanderbilt Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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