An entertaining account by an ’80s radio icon.
A radio DJ recounts his years as a participant in the new-wave scene in this debut memoir.
Blade—a longtime DJ at the Los Angeles radio station KROQ and a television personality credited with helping to popularize new-wave music in America—seems like one of those people who should already have written a book or two. Not so. Blade has only recently put down in print his stories of coming up during the zenith of rock radio, a time when the tastes and personalities of DJs truly shaped the musical landscape. The author recounts growing up in England in the 1960s and discovering rock ’n’ roll via Radio Luxembourg: “The British government frowned upon this intrusion into its airwaves but could do nothing as suddenly every kid in the UK was listening to 208 and buying the songs they heard on the station.” As a young man, he worked as a club DJ in Europe before relocating to Los Angeles to find himself at the epicenter of the music business, interviewing and mingling with some of the greatest stars of the ’80s. From watching “Rio” debut (and bomb) at the Roxy while standing next to Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon to having his heart broken by Terri Nunn of Berlin, Blade takes readers back to 1982 in all its sexy, druggy, synthy glory. The author’s prose is simple, but he’s a natural raconteur who never quite shakes off his own awe at the situations in which he found himself: “We were working long hours, under crazy conditions with drugs and guns in plain sight and doing it all for free.” Like all books of this genre, the work drops a parade of names and delivers a good deal of romanticizing, but Blade’s aversion to drugs and alcohol makes him a more reliable reporter than most from that milieu. Fans of his era of music will find much to appreciate in this autobiography, which manages to capture not only the life of the author, but also the experience of a generation (perhaps the last) for which rock was the greatest force in the world.
An entertaining account by an ’80s radio icon.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9990210-7-1
Page Count: 530
Publisher: Indigo River Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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