An honest personal portrait but also one where the author could have revealed more—and written less.
Amiable and informative, if not always compelling, memoir by the folkie who anchored Jefferson Airplane.
As guitarist for Airplane, Kaukonen once wrote a memorable acoustic instrumental named “Embryonic Journey.” That could well serve as a title for this debut, the septuagenarian rocker’s therapeutic account of his inner and outer life and times. The son of a State Department attaché, Kaukonen’s formative years were spent traveling around the world. Along the way, he became an obsessive finger-picking guitarist and, luckily, wound up back on the family’s California home turf at a time when legendary bands were formed at a moment’s notice. Such was the case with the Airplane, which reaped a hefty advance from the beginning and created a new and defiantly trippy sound. “All of a sudden,” he writes, “psychedelic was no longer a door to perception or an excuse to party…it was becoming a genre!” As the money rolled in, so did amphetamines (among many other pharmaceuticals) and more music. “I am convinced that many of the crystalline solos on those Airplane recordings were directly related to that little orange pill,” writes the author. “It’s funny to think that my life could have been so completely ruled by mood-altering substances, but at the time it would never have occurred to me that there might be another way to live.” Kaukonen spares little in describing the winding path of his life, both the ups (writing and playing music) and the downs (addiction and a destructive codependent marriage). Unfortunately, his philosophical and spiritual ramblings become increasingly repetitive and tedious. Also, while he offers factual details about life inside the Airplane (and follow-up band Hot Tuna), he is short on offering the kind of interesting personal details only he would know—e.g, what was/is lead singer Grace Slick really like? Was he affected by the controversies swirling around the provocative “Volunteers” album?
An honest personal portrait but also one where the author could have revealed more—and written less.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12548-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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