Besides appealing to fans, the book ably captures the lost milieu of independent rock, which Nirvana’s moment irretrievably...
You-are-there narrative of Nirvana’s rise, focused on the trio’s comrades at the dawn of Alternative Nation.
Soulsby (Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide, 2012) builds his second book concerning Nirvana’s brief run and long shadow through the recollections of Nirvana’s fellow musicians, most (though not all) of whom remained obscure. This is in line with the most positive aspect of how Nirvana’s success transformed the regional American musical underground: "Nirvana never felt it was above the many bands they befriended; they always felt they were part of the community who tell this tale rather than of the celebrity world they joined.” Formed four years prior to 1991’s chart-topping “Nevermind,” the band’s core was the fragile, artistic Kurt Cobain and the less-enigmatic rocker Krist Novoselic. Benefitting from the communal, low-budget vibe in the Pacific Northwest music scene, their nascent band quickly evolved into an efficient, hard-driven touring machine, alongside other avatars of grunge like Tad and Mudhoney. As one musician observed, early Nirvana was “definitely still grunge but with better venues comes better sound and all things better.” Naturally, Cobain’s spirit hangs over the storytelling; he’s remembered as withdrawn and clearly overwhelmed by health issues and controlled substances but also for kindness and humor. In an improbable moment, as they were taken under Sonic Youth’s wing and added powerhouse drummer Dave Grohl, all the elements aligned for a major cultural shift. As “Nevermind” broke big, the band “brought the communal spirit of the underground to whatever strange land was opening up for them,” engaging social causes and booking confrontational bands as opening acts. As Soulsby notes, “Nirvana saw fame as valuable only if it stood for something.” Yet the rockers’ reflections become increasingly poignant as the band’s denouement approaches.
Besides appealing to fans, the book ably captures the lost milieu of independent rock, which Nirvana’s moment irretrievably transformed.Pub Date: March 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06152-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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