by Kristin Hersh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2015
The book’s great sadness is matched by the skill and vitality of Hersh’s writing; it will make treasured and troubled...
Glimpses of a musician’s life and death.
When the singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt (1964-2009) committed suicide with an overdose of muscle relaxants, he left behind an acclaimed, if not widely known, body of work and a devoted following, particularly among fellow musicians. One of those musicians is Hersh (Rat Girl: A Memoir, 2010, etc.), leader of the alternative rock band Throwing Muses, who became close friends with Chesnutt and, as a solo artist, toured with him often. Her book, a combination of memoir and prose poem, is an occasionally cryptic and often oblique elegy for the man with whom she shared many hours onstage and off, touring small venues for little pay where a certain principled indie rock still thrives. Chesnutt, who was paralyzed and used a wheelchair, appears here as cantankerous, outrageous, vulgar, and brilliant; Hersh, whose devotion always triumphs over her exasperation, also emphasizes his moments of kindness and humor. Wisely, the author does not linger on the sound of his music or his two-finger guitar playing—that is best left to the recordings—but she does capture his incessant wordplay and talent for pulling perfectly formed lyrics and melodies seemingly out of the air or, more often, the conversations around him. Chesnutt’s banter—with Hersh, himself, or anyone in earshot—can be quite funny, and even when it borders on inside-joke territory, it makes the author’s account more endearing. But this is hardly a fond remembrance, as Hersh’s portrait of Chesnutt is colored by pain, frustration, and, ultimately, heartbreak. Despite the author’s best efforts, Chesnutt remains a somewhat inscrutable figure—though there is no mistaking the rareness and depth of their friendship.
The book’s great sadness is matched by the skill and vitality of Hersh’s writing; it will make treasured and troubled reading for fans of Chesnutt and the author alike.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-292-75947-3
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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PROFILES
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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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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