A timid, uncontroversial look at one of the most controversial, outspoken female musicians in history.
By-the-numbers biography of irascible jazz singer Nina Simone (1933–2003).
Cohodas (Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington, 2004, etc.) culls his research mostly from Simone’s autobiography, newspaper clippings and other secondhand sources, creating a cut-and-paste patchwork that only skims the surface of the singer’s artistic persona and never gives a satisfying sense of the private woman behind the public performer. However, early chapters isolate certain important factors that would have undeniable and increasingly negative repercussions throughout Simone’s 40-plus-year career. As a teenager, the classically trained Simone (formerly Eunice Waymon) was accepted into Juilliard but rejected by the über-prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Cohodas mildly suggests that this rejection burned its way into Simone’s subconscious where it partly metamorphosed into lifelong resentment—and thus, a compensatory overinflated sense of self. What began as activist zeal and a positive, healthy sense of racial pride swelled into mean-spirited public racial divisiveness. This behavioral shift took place, ironically, just as she began to find more popular acceptance and financial success after years of struggling in small clubs and racking up anemic album-sales figures. The author’s obvious attempt at a conservatively objective take on Simone’s life is admirable, but Cohodas never deals with why Simone’s increasingly erratic, narcissistic—and often downright unprofessional—behavior onstage never seemed to have significant negative financial consequences or elicit any serious career-damaging backlash. Simone continued to pull in huge fees for her concerts well into her waning years just before her death in 2003. Although Cohodas gives the reader a pleasingly vivid sense of what a typical live performance was like, this is anything but a comprehensive psychological portrait of the offstage Nina Simone.
A timid, uncontroversial look at one of the most controversial, outspoken female musicians in history.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-42401-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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