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SOUL SERENADE

Name: SOUL SERENADE
Author: Rashod Ollison
ISBN: 978-0807057520

RHYTHM, BLUES & COMING OF AGE THROUGH VINYL

by Rashod Ollison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 26, 2016

Honest and painful. Readers inclined to lament their own circumstances may brighten up when considering the odds Ollison has...

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An elegiac look at a childhood marked by violence, dysfunction, poverty, sorrow—and plenty of good music.

Little Rock native Ollison, former Baltimore Sun pop critic and now a writer for the Virginian-Pilot, opens this memoir with a horrific incident that unfolds like a Greek tragedy, its sad climax the death by bullet of a tiny young sibling, “bow lips parted and baby-doll eyes flung open,” in the arms of the girl who would become his mother. Unhappy memory builds on unhappy memory: there is the brief, shining courtship, then a father who will disappear and appear and disappear again, “often in the streets when he wasn’t nodding off at home or having nightmares that made him scream and jump in bed,” along with a mother who finds no need to express love as long as she puts food on the table, a scary grandmother whose face bore “its usual fuck-you expression,” and a community of children inclined to bewilderment in the face of all that adult confusion. Much of Ollison’s memoir, reminiscent at many turns of Claude Brown’s classic Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), turns on the quest for identity: when his schoolmates shout “faggot,” there’s more at play than they might have realized. But more, what shapes identity and offers hope and even love are the records that Ollison spins, left behind by his father and picked up along the way: Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Tyrone Davis, Stevie Wonder, and, of more recent vintage, Mary J. Blige (“the wounded warrior voice of my generation”). So powerful are Ollison’s responses to music that readers might wish that he addressed the matter in more circumstantial detail, if at least for dramatic relief from his descriptions of passing events that are often ponderously awful.

Honest and painful. Readers inclined to lament their own circumstances may brighten up when considering the odds Ollison has overcome.

Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016

ISBN: 978-0807057520

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | LGBTQ

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)