Solid overall, as we have come to expect from Wall, though some readers might prefer Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarmen’s...
In which the Lizard King is revealed to have been human after all.
The dead–Jim Morrison industry has fallen off somewhat in recent years, but there’s still lively interest in the Doors on the part of music fans around the world—and readers, too. British rock writer/biographer Wall (Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe, 2015, etc.) does a good service by removing the spotlight from Morrison and putting it on the other three members of the legendary 1960s rock group. For instance, he writes, the little-heard-from drummer John Densmore, had problems with the front guy, “becoming ever more frustrated at the increasingly over-indulgent antics of the only guy in the band who couldn’t actually play an instrument.” The author credits guitarist Robbie Krieger with being the chief driving force behind the creation of the band’s catchiest tunes, giving Krieger and keyboardist Ray Manzarek full props for sonic ability and hipness made all the more hip by their lack of Morrison’s showy self-destruction. The usual figures, including the mystical Indian of Morrison myth, bow in, but Wall gives greater attention to the players who shaped the Doors’ legacy—the engineers and producers and background figures who never get enough attention. Though the author too often writes like someone’s superannuated uncle who never quite got over Woodstock (“Ray, who made the whole thing up, man. Kept the train on the tracks”), he tells a good story, and his attention to both the musical and business parts of the equation is a welcome addition to the usual fawning over Morrison’s Adonis-like qualities. Furthermore, the author has talked to the right people, at least those of them left alive, from producer and guiding light Jac Holzman to scene-maker Pamela Des Barres, who only faintly protests that Jim wasn’t anything but straight.
Solid overall, as we have come to expect from Wall, though some readers might prefer Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarmen’s canonical No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980) for sheer rock-’n’-roll esprit.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61373-408-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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