A workmanlike but illuminating book for fans of the Ramones and punk rock in general.
The last Ramone standing dishes on Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy, but the drummer is a lot more revealing about his own remarkable life outside the famously dysfunctional band.
There’s nothing in Ramone’s (born Marc Bell) sometimes bitingly funny rock ’n’ roll memoir that sheds new light on the Ramones’ notoriously eccentric band dynamic. Efforts to fully understand just how the Ramones operated remain as elusive as ever. However, this story about how a longshoreman’s son from Brooklyn somehow became one of the progenitors of a new musical art form born in the bowels of downtown dive bars is compelling enough on its own. The Ramones were still in their heyday in the late 1970s when Tommy Ramone, the group’s original drummer, decided he’d had enough. At the time, the soon-to-be Marky Ramone was already a key figure in the CBGBs music scene, helping to trumpet the arrival of the “Blank Generation” with the likes of Wayne County and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. “Richard was an interesting-looking guy,” writes the author. “He wore his hair kind of spikey. I didn’t know if it was intentional or just the result of not shampooing much.” Marky ultimately got the Ramones gig, and the New York rockers were able to march forward with their Chuck Taylors laced tight and their leather jackets zipped up. Unfortunately, the brotherhood was in shambles. The author recalls the ongoing fights and feuds, as well as his own descent into the bottle. Drumming for the Ramones sent him way over the edge and into a terrifying rehab center on Staten Island, but he was able to claw his way back to sobriety with a newfound sense of purpose. Sadly, time ran out for the rest of the Ramones, and they never got to fully share in brother Marky’s enlightenment.
A workmanlike but illuminating book for fans of the Ramones and punk rock in general.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1451687750
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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