by Julia Blackburn ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2005
It isn’t certain that the world needs another book about Billie Holiday. But it’s definitely not this one.
Hitherto little-seen research about Billie Holiday is put to ill use.
It may have seemed good as a proposal: the acclaimed English biographer and novelist Blackburn (The Leper’s Companions, 1999, etc.) would look at jazz singer/icon Holiday through the eyes of previously unheard witnesses. But Blackburn’s book is lazy, lurid, superficial and more than a bit of a cheat. True, the late Linda Kuehl’s early-’70s interviews, which serve as the basis for this work, have never been mined extensively, but Donald Clarke made use of Kuehl’s choicest stuff in his 1994 Wishing On the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday. It quickly becomes clear why Kuehl’s own editor had misgivings about her draft biography: the witnesses—ranging from Holiday’s childhood friends in Baltimore to musicians, pimps, dope dealers and the drug agents who saw her meteoric rise to fame and precipitous fall from grace—focused on the most sordid aspects of Lady Day’s saga. Precious little is provided about her music, save in the bright remembrances of the late pianist Jimmy Rowles, while many thrice-told tales appear about her alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, bisexuality and masochistic romantic relationships. Though the sales pitch here is that new voices will be heard, the reader seldom actually hears them. Most chapters are clumsy paraphrases, and what’s verbatim is often unilluminating. Moreover, Blackburn is simply the wrong writer for the job. She betrays a nearly complete lack of knowledge of the cultures and vernaculars of jazz and drugs—a failure that dooms a project like this one from the get-go. She also pads her heavily footnoted text—which is riddled with gaping holes due to the shortfalls of Kuehl’s research—with flatly written and hardly incisive chapters, drawn entirely from secondary sources, about figures as important to Holiday’s life as saxophonist Lester Young and as peripheral as actress Tallulah Bankhead.
It isn’t certain that the world needs another book about Billie Holiday. But it’s definitely not this one.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40610-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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 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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