A complex take on the often simplified topic of contemporary manhood, with relevance to current cultural controversies...
A meditative memoir by a first-generation Colombian-American who forged personal identity through music, faith, and fatherhood.
In his debut, NPR cultural critic Vidal synthesizes cultural critique and personal history, attempting to understand how his generation of African-American and Latinx men have transcended expectations and stereotypes to establish family and community structures as the titular “rap dads.” His initial intent, he writes, “was to chronicle my journey to manhood and fatherhood and what it has meant to me as an artist.” He vividly recalls his own rambunctious South Florida childhood, which included an absent father with a criminal reputation and his own dabbling in delinquency, culminating in a disciplinary year exiled to his relatives in Colombia. This fueled an interest in spirituality, which led to a stint with a youthful, Christian hip-hop collective; while his group toured and recorded, they found it hard to break through. “By the time I hit twenty-two,” he writes, “I already felt ancient.” Despite thwarted ambitions, he pursued music even as he married and had the first of three children, admitting, “doubt crept into my gut. I carried it around the way my wife clung to joyful anticipation.” Eventually, he transitioned from performing music to writing about it, necessity and enthusiasm fueling a career as an editor and freelancer. Vidal captures the serenity and enthusiasm fatherhood engendered in his peers: “Now we shot hoops and curbed our language, our kids orbiting us like small planets.” He varies this narrative with cogent discussions of (and sometimes with) key rap figures like Nas, Chuck D, and Jay-Z, noting, “it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that hip-hop helped raise me.” Vidal’s writing on diverse topics is thoughtful and sometimes funny, but his focus on personal experiences can be repetitive, with narrative aspects that can peter out or seem generalized.
A complex take on the often simplified topic of contemporary manhood, with relevance to current cultural controversies regarding immigration and identity.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6939-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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