by Josh Frank with Charlie Buckholtz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 12, 2008
Well-stocked with interviews and evidence—a respectful, understanding portrait of a talented and unique soul who never...
The lost life of a groundbreaking musician and artist, murdered on the (possible) cusp of fame.
When researching his history of the iconic underground rock band Pixies (Fool the World, 2006), Frank came across a haunting song they often covered in concert called “In Heaven, Everything is Fine,” which he remembered vaguely from Eraserhead. He then found out it had been written for David Lynch by some guy named Peter Ivers. The book that Frank creates with freelance writer Buckholtz out of that serendipitous moment pays tribute to a gifted but unknown 20th-century American artist. A precociously talented child of Brookline, Mass., Ivers decamped for Harvard in the mid-’60s. The college was a font of theatrical and comedic energy, a staging ground for a bunch of high-voltage artistic personalities ranging from Stockard Channing to the entire National Lampoon crowd, which would utterly change American comedy in a few short years. A master blues harmonica player who often jammed with Muddy Waters, Ivers used his phenomenal musical talent, quick wit and bright-eyed enthusiasm to make himself indispensable in this fast-track crowd. But fame eluded him. A few albums went nowhere, and a disastrous opening performance for Fleetwood Mac put an end to his dreams of rock stardom. Relocated to Los Angeles, the gregarious Ivers again became a nodal point, this time in the city’s raw punk scene. As the host of a surreal, cult cable-access show, New Wave Theatre, he brought together Lampoon star Doug Kenney with punk agitators Fear and Dead Kennedys, while Hollywood friends Harold Ramis, John Belushi and Lynch came by to groove on the vibe. In 1983, on the verge of achieving some industry recognition, Ivers was found bludgeoned to death in his loft; the killer was never apprehended.
Well-stocked with interviews and evidence—a respectful, understanding portrait of a talented and unique soul who never managed to find a solid perch in the world.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5120-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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by Josh Frank with Tim Heidecker ; illustrated by Manuela Pertega
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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