A compelling read for fans of Collins and/or those confronting their own addictive behavior.
The famed recording artist recalls her past struggles with overeating and alcoholism.
In her latest memoir, Collins (Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music, 2011, etc.) treads some familiar territory covered in her previous books, referencing love affairs with Stephen Stills and others, her many musical triumphs, and the devastating impact of her son’s suicide. More urgently, the author focuses on her addictions, specifically her long-standing ones with excessive alcohol and food consumption. The chapters cover specific decades of her life up through the 1980s, as Collins highlights the trajectory of her accomplishments in relation to the course of her illness and extreme forms of indulgence: several bottles of vodka consumed each week, frequent episodes of bingeing and purging. Despite these issues, however, her career continued to soar. “While I was performing my anxieties and fears disappeared; the music gave me peace of mind, the melodies and lyrics gave me wings,” she writes. “And the pain of the increase in my drinking and the growing evidence that I had a problem with food did not seem to impact my career.” She alternates her recovery story with biographical sketches of renowned diet and nutrition authorities such as Robert Atkins, Andrew Weil, Jean Nidtech, and Adelle Davis along with notable historical figures such as English Romantic poet Lord Byron, who also confronted an extreme eating disorder. For the most part, Collins is a graceful writer. In a memoir that is equal parts confessional drama and inspirational self-help book, she shares an engaging tale and provides some meaningful information for readers who may be struggling with similar issues. However, the alternating structure often feels contrived and may lead readers to question whether she was seeking ways to stretch her own narrative or perhaps had two books in mind.
A compelling read for fans of Collins and/or those confronting their own addictive behavior.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54131-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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