If you’re scoring your own funeral, this book of prompts will get you going.
What’s the song you’d like to exit the stage with? Money executive editor Ayers solicited answers from 30 musicians, resulting in an oddly entertaining if morbid anthology.
Perhaps in a bid to forestall the inevitable, The Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy names Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks,” a song that runs a little longer than seven minutes. Lauren Mayberry, singer for Scottish synth-pop group Chvrches, takes the length down by half with Katy Perry’s “Firework,” and New Pornographers’ A.C. Newman goes with Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street,” which he describes as “the most perfectly recorded song.” The collection is full of surprises. For example, the sometimes grim rocker Stephen Malkmus selects Gordon Lightfoot’s sweet-natured “Carefree Highway,” finding a dark cloud to wrap around that silver lining, while Lucinda Williams weeps at the folk standard, “Shenandoah,” a song that “is just so beautiful, so gorgeous,” even as her own songs are so often about death simply because, as the years roll by, death becomes an ever more constant companion. A pleasingly elusive answer comes from actor and musician Will Oldham, who performs under the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy and who also tries to cheat death a touch by extending the going-out period: “If someone would say, ‘Something is going to happen and your existence is going to end in a month and you have to listen to some music…‘I’d probably say, ‘Okay, let’s make a new record.’ ” The best parts of the narrative, though, which is often prosaic, are the editor’s own listicles and sidebars—e.g., the songs most often played at funerals (“My Way” wins overall) or intriguing musical ironies (Jim Morrison’s last live song performance was “The End”). Other contributors include Andre 3000, Jeff Tweedy, Regina Spektor, Bettye Lavette, and Jim James, who provides the foreword.
If you’re scoring your own funeral, this book of prompts will get you going.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3820-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Abrams Image
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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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