Of beat-keeping, boozing, and stardom: Genesis drummer and solo star Collins tells…well, something approaching all. Two things are evident from the beginning of this amiable tour of a life in pop music. The first is that the author is a somewhat reluctant star, glad of the successes of others and mistrustful of his own: “I ha[d] to follow a solo album that wasn’t meant to be an album, far less a hit,” he writes of his early 1980s breakthrough. “Writing another may not be a task I’m up to.” The second is that Collins is a true-blue fan of rock, having first tasted it as an extra on the set of the Beatles’ 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night, his scene left on the cutting-room floor for reasons he winningly explains. Throughout, the author skirts some of the tender issues that broke up the monster band Genesis, sending Peter Gabriel to a solo career and Collins from the drummer’s stool to center stage as lead singer. When he criticizes, it is mostly himself in the cross hairs, and when he writes of the dynamics resurrected in a reunion some years back, it is gingerly: “Peter will therefore, unavoidably, take charge of some aspects of the operation. And with the best will in the world, there might be some resentment from some quarters at this.” Collins writes with sensitivity of his alcoholism and shrugs off some of the angst that propelled his biggest hits. “If I was feeling that much pain night after night,” he writes, “I’d be a crackpot.” And he doesn’t toot his horn overmuch, though anyone who can listen to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway without being moved and grooved has no soul. As for “Sussudio,” granted, not so much…. Though without the gruff nastiness of Keith Richards’ Life or the raw poetry of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, this is a pleasing entry in the pop-confessional genre.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90747-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2016
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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