Retains little of gonzo journalism’s original fun and destructive joy.
The original art director of all things gonzo, Steadman recalls 30 years of mythic adventures with the Master.
The Welsh graphic artist first encountered Hunter S. Thompson, who greeted him with a shot of Mace, in 1970. Their collaboration on a report about the depravity of the Kentucky Derby (now a collector’s item) marked the legendary birth of a special form of journalism. The pair went on to cover the America’s Cup, the Ali-Foreman match in Zaire, life in Hawaii and the 1972 political conventions. They produced their masterwork, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in 1971. Steadman had no share in that copyright, an omission he didn’t notice then but is plenty mad about now (which might explain his dubious claim that “the book was noticed mainly for the drawings”). Up through Thompson’s suicide last year, theirs was not an easy relationship. Hunter’s feet stank, his friend reports. He hated Steadman’s attempts at writing, and “Hunter’s friendship was also a business agreement. . . . He was much more into deals than personal affection.” Yet Steadman chronicles three decades of bonhomie: swigging Wild Turkey at Owl Farm, driving dangerously, indulging in lots of dope and not a few guns. (They even do some shooting with William Burroughs.) Much of this memoir consists of letters to and from Thompson. Relying on repetitive, puerile, insult comedy, the correspondence is hardly on par with Bernard Shaw’s or even Groucho Marx’s missives. Bitching about the state of the world and listing America’s faults, the author begins in this text to sound like an old man wandering and cursing, lost in a shopping mall.
Retains little of gonzo journalism’s original fun and destructive joy.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101282-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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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