To use a gospel-music term for a hot gig, Guralnick turns the house out.
Elvis Presley’s masterful biographer delivers a brilliant depiction of “Mr. Soul.”
Guralnick, author of the definitive two-volume Presley bio Last Train to Memphis (1994) and Careless Love (1999), has grappled with Sam Cooke before—in his fine 1986 R&B history Sweet Soul Music, in his script for the 2003 VH1 film Legend and in numerous album notes. His magnificent full-length treatment of the great gospel/R&B/pop vocalist was worth the wait. Guralnick follows the Mississippi-born, Chicago-bred singer from his groundbreaking tenure in gospel’s Soul Stirrers through his sudden (and, in gospel circles, controversial) ascent to crossover stardom in the late ’50s. He offers a fascinating portrait of a driven, ambitious African-American performer at work on the “chitlin circuit” and in the lily-white pop business, amid the ferment of the era’s civil-rights conflicts. Guralnick notes that Cooke was also a pathfinding black music entrepreneur: In 1959—the same year Berry Gordy started Motown—he founded his own independent label, SAR, where he midwifed the careers of Bobby Womack, Lou Rawls and Johnnie Taylor. Cooke conquered New York’s Copacabana nightclub and the English concert stage, and became close to such black political and cultural figures as Malcolm X and Cassius Clay; his potential appeared unlimited when he was shot dead in a mystifying incident at a Los Angeles motel in December 1964. Guralnick offers a deeply reported study of this complex man, deftly counterpoising accounts of Cooke’s charm, intelligence and seemingly effortless art with measured accounts of his anger, remoteness, ruthlessness and lifelong womanizing. The author is equally at home with the fine points of the gospel road, the machinations of the record industry and the sweeping political and racial tumult that was a backdrop to Cooke’s meteoric career. The writing is as relaxed, graceful and affecting as a superior Cooke performance. It’s another unsurpassable work by one of music’s most knowledgeable and sensitive chroniclers.
To use a gospel-music term for a hot gig, Guralnick turns the house out.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-37794-5
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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