Tart, self-assured, and lasting.
It can’t be said that her relationship with Bob Marley was easy, but his wife of 15 years portrays it as intensely close and spiritual.
Rita Marley grew up in the rough Trench Town slums of Kingston, Jamaica. She was born to sing, and it wasn’t long before she conspired to bump into the Wailing Wailers as they walked to the recording studio down the road from her house. She formed the Soulettes to serve as the Wailers’ backup singers, and she formed a bond with Bob Marley close enough to lead to marriage. She joined Bob in the Rastafarian movement, which has some very specific prescriptions and proscriptions—although evidently, having numerous sexual relations outside marriage was not one of them, as Bob rarely spent the night with Rita. When she decided in 1971, after years of desperate poverty, that “the music thing was definitely not working” and she would have to go work in the US, leaving her children prompted sharp sadness. Meanwhile, Bob was busy back home getting two girlfriends pregnant. After Island Records took a chance on the “bad boys” against industry advice, they shot to fame, Bob played around even more, and the Marleys became as brother and sister. Rita’s role was to serve as protector: “I’d become more like a guardian. . . . I had more responsibility than just that of a wife,” she writes, admitting that the situation often pained her (“The boys born while I was in Delaware were not the last born outside our marriage, and I ended up taking care of many of them”). Marley doesn’t mince her words as she describes Trench Town, the trials of being penniless followed by the trials of being wealthy, and Bob’s probably preventable death.
Tart, self-assured, and lasting.Pub Date: April 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-7868-6867-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
