Fairy-tale vignettes of love and sacrifice, sprawling homes in the Nashville suburbs, and the hardships of raising children on the road riddle the interviews of Mrs. George Jones with Nashville’s most talked-about spouses. Tempered by Jones’s dramatic spin and her polite nosiness, these true tales of southern celebrity claim a certain entertaining starkness—the same (very popular) starkness as country music. Ghostwriter and collaborator Carter’s invisible imprint may have helped to send each wife’s account on a biographical turn; the chapters take a long-term look at these women’s former lives before they became the luckiest women below the Mason-Dixon line. Revealed covertly beneath their stories of marriage, home, family, and fame is the society of Nashville, particularly the clash between music-industry executive thinking and the traditional southern roles of husbands and wives. Jones repeatedly describes how industry pressures often bring pain to the domestic arena. However, these women’s stories are packaged to save the faces of Nashville heroines before the story inside the story is really delivered. In the chapter about Mrs. Billy Ray (Tish) Cyrus, for example, Tish is introduced alone in her bedroom in Kentucky, crying—with her hand outstretched to the television screen. On the screen, far away in Nashville, her husband croons with ’sexuality and mystery,— as if —unattached,— and only at the insistence of his management—which is looking, of course, for the next Elvis, and hopes he may be It. Ultimately, Billy Ray breaks with old management, makes millions, and everyone stops fighting. To top it off, Tish had given up a potential career in modeling to fit Billy Ray’s on-again/off-again tour schedule—and to act as the proudest president ever of the Billy Ray Cyrus fan club. The wives and the author—a wife herself—work hard to bring the Nashville myth to life. Sometimes, despite all the non-secrets unveiled here, the myth even seems genuine. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-018270-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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