by Paul Brannigan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2011
Reverent and informative, but too distanced from its subject.
Former Kerrang! editor Brannigan’s scattershot attempt at presenting a definitive biographical portrait of reluctant rock star Dave Grohl.
The author’s unauthorized bio of Nirvana drummer turned Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl is his first book, and in some ways it reflects the author’s lack of experience. Brannigan allows his subject’s personal history to be swallowed up by the larger cultural history that his bands helped to shape. For example, when broaching the subject of Grohl’s early interest in punk, the author provides a mediocre textbook history of punk rock, followed by a surface-skimming overview of the Washington, D.C., hardcore scene that would eventually lure Grohl into its clutches. Grohl was a high-school dropout touring with hardcore bands by the time he was 17; yet he was rarely the dominant personality in any of his bands, from his younger days in hardcore outfits Dain Bramage and Scream, to his drumming duties in world-conquering grunge band Nirvana. Brannigan begins to deal with Grohl’s tenure in Nirvana during the peak of that band’s success around 1992. Even in his own post-Nirvana project Foo Fighters, it wasn’t until almost a decade into this second career that he finally embraced his public role as bandleader. Brannigan, obviously stretching his limited access to Grohl, takes a bio-by-the-numbers approach to the Foo Fighters legacy. We’re privy to a few mild controversies and personality clashes during the making of each album, as well as the predictable listing of critical notices from the rock press and Grohl's always-brief side of things. If this book is a reliable measure, Grohl is a simple, uncontroversial, not-particularly-quotable guy who saves his self-expression for his music. If nothing else, Brannigan salutes a musician who’s surfaced, prosperous and sane, from the perils of an extended punk-rock adolescence that not all of his friends survived.
Reverent and informative, but too distanced from its subject.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-306-81956-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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