For die-hard Ray Charles fans only.
Unremarkable memoir of the son of music legend Ray Charles.
Robinson recalls his upbringing and relationship with Charles based on his childhood memories, which are incomplete at best, and his own life story is simply not as compelling as his father’s. The most engaging sections of the book concern Robinson’s youth. In plain prose, he re-creates a sense of his father’s rapid upward trajectory in the 1950s after a life of struggle, and his surreal existence as the inquisitive child of a brilliant black celebrity in a segregated America. As a child, his father was present in his life as a benevolent, fascinating, yet distant figure. Robinson is frank about the darker undercurrents in his father’s meticulously arranged existence as family man and famous bandleader. He became aware of his heroin addiction before it culminated in the musician’s 1965 arrest, as well as his penchant for extramarital affairs. “My father's appetite for women was insatiable,” he writes. When the author was 18, in 1973, his mother finally initiated divorce proceedings, which shocked and embittered Charles, who “had convinced himself that the other women shouldn't matter to her as long as she was his wife and he took care of her.” Throughout, Robinson’s writing is workmanlike and bland, and the narrative becomes tedious as the adult author repeatedly sobers up and relapses into drug use. Even producing the lauded film Ray triggered this cycle—“the film would force me to revisit all the trauma, fear, and anxiety of my childhood.” With regard to his father’s death in 2004, Robinson flagellates himself for not spending more time with him in his last days, and accuses Charles’ handlers of quickly shutting out family members as the music world honored an icon.
For die-hard Ray Charles fans only.Pub Date: June 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46293-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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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