Whatever’s missing (including more context of how popular music was changing while her own music was changing), what’s here...
A personable and engagingly written memoir, though reticent and short on personal revelation.
The subtitle reinforces the focus, but even readers who don’t want to wallow in gossip might be expecting more than, “I was keeping company with then-governor Jerry Brown” and, “I was keeping steady company with journalist Pete Hamill,” without any context about how these and other relationships began or developed. The epilogue begins, “I live these days with my two children,” which is the first mention of them. Yet for those content with an illumination of the artist’s musical eclecticism, and what music means to her, the book is informative and heartfelt. It suggests (without the singer ever belaboring the point) that Ronstadt deserves more credit than she often receives for popularizing country rock, for taking the then-daring but now commonplace initiative to interpret the pre-rock Great American Songbook, to follow her instincts wherever they might lead her, from The Pirates of Penzance to traditional Mexican mariachi. “I never felt that rock and roll defined me,” she writes. “There was an unyielding attitude that came with the music that involved being confrontational, dismissive, and aggressive—or, as my mother would say, ungracious.” She also explains, “I felt some stagnation setting in, and the relentless touring and endless repetition of the same songs over and over again promoted a creeping awareness that my music had begun to sound like my washing machine….I was beginning to feel miserable. And trapped.” So she made choices that others considered unwise, or at least noncommercial, and reaped all sorts of rewards.
Whatever’s missing (including more context of how popular music was changing while her own music was changing), what’s here is consistently interesting.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6872-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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