Well-written life of singer-pianist Simone, as notable for its clear, strong voice as for its events, which are pretty strong too. Despite some wild moments, Simone's is a life to be proud of and she tells it modestly but with an emotional accuracy of recall that makes her book stand out from other celebrity lives. Born Eunice Waymon and raised in South and North Carolina, Simone was the sixth child of a preacher mother. Early seen as a child prodigy of the piano, she practiced five hours a day for decades, intent on becoming the first black concert pianist. But after a year at Juilliard and despite her gifts, she was turned down by the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia—she thinks for being black. To make a living, she took a job in a Philadelphia dive, playing and singing for drunks. She played classical/folk/pop, giving huge, sweeping interpretations of pieces like ``I Loves You, Porgy'' that could last three hours. Recording dates followed. Her marriages were duds, the second being to a cop with a Jekyll/Hyde personality, who became her manager and landed her in deep water with the IRS. Meeting playwright Lorraine Hansberry led Simone into civil-rights activity. She was hit hard by the deaths of Hansberry, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, underwent some kind of mental breakdown, lost her home to the IRS, fled to Europe, and later, with Miriam Makeba, to Liberia. Liberia was paradise and, after a mad evening spent dancing stark-naked in a club for two hours, she was pursued by black millionaires. Trouble followed her, and she later wound up in Barbados as the mistress of the P.M. A failed suicide attempt was eventually followed by resolution of her tax problems and a comeback. Simone captures each person in her life with silverpoint outlines and never shies from baring the truth. A gripping life that rings true. (Sixteen b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41068-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
