A worthy postmortem tribute that admirably avoids both easy sensationalism and knee-jerk sentimentalism.
A sympathetic revisiting of the King of Pop's rich musical legacy.
In 1983, writes noted music critic and memoirist George (City Kid: A Writer's Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success, 2009, etc.), “Dell published my first book, The Michael Jackson Story, a pocket-sized quickie biography of the singer” that capitalized on his unprecedented success. Fittingly, the author now offers this reverent—but not wholly uncritical—blend of memoir, music journalism and pop sociology to commemorate the untimely death of the controversial but immensely gifted pop icon. George traces his own memories of the Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson's solo career, both as a live act and through the recordings, while growing up in ’70s Brooklyn. He depicts the rise of the Jackson family from working-class Gary, Ind., as partly stemming from patriarch Joe Jackson's own frustrated ambitions as a musician. George expertly examines important turning points in Jackson's career, including the profound influence of disco (Saturday Night Fever, especially) on his work, leading to the smash album Off the Wall in 1979, which set the stage for the paradigm-shifting 1982 breakthrough, Thriller. That album's barrier-breaking influence opened doors for not only black performers but African-Americans as a whole. (George posits the success of Thriller as a catalyst for the rise to power of Oprah, and even Barack Obama.) The author helpfully acknowledges the behind-the-scenes session players and producers who kept the Jackson juggernaut rolling for so long—most importantly, Thriller mastermind Quincy Jones. But George also considers the downside of Thriller's runaway success. Jackson's newly inflated commercial ambitions, among other things, led to the infamous Pepsi ad rehearsal during which the performer's hair caught fire, an incident that may have begun his longtime addiction to painkillers. Sadly, the post-Thriller era ushered in the weirdly “eccentric” side of Jackson, which ultimately led to bad business deals, failed marriages and ignominious sex scandals.
A worthy postmortem tribute that admirably avoids both easy sensationalism and knee-jerk sentimentalism.Pub Date: June 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81878-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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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