Those who loved the author’s debut should enjoy this follow-up.
Prequel to Rolling Stone contributing editor Sheffield’s Love Is a Mix Tape (2007).
There’s a truism in rock that a breakthrough hit the first time through will often lead to a sophomore slump. The author’s second attempt to use favorite songs to reflect on and illuminate his life isn’t really a disappointment, though it necessarily lacks the emotional power of Mix Tape. Where that memoir of the 1990s had a natural narrative arc, from the birth of love to the heartbreaking death of the author’s young wife, this successor, which focuses on the ’80s—the musical culture and the author’s formative years—is more of a hodge-podge collection of essays straining for cohesion. Proceeding chronologically, with 25 chapters titled after songs released during the ’80s, Sheffield pursues a general theme of how girls and boys talk about, think about and feel about music differently. There are incisive chapters on Hall & Oates, Paul McCartney and the Replacements (“they made good imaginary friends”), along with revelations about how the author was an altar boy until 16, never had a girlfriend until 19 and had a traumatic experience clipping his grandfather’s toenails. Though the reader learns in passing about the author’s remarriage, much of the talk about girls concerns his younger sisters, “the coolest people I knew.” Where Sheffield’s debut felt cathartic, some of this book seems comparatively glib—for example, “There are times in a man’s life that can only be described as ‘times in a man’s life.’ The first time he experiences A Flock of Seagulls is one of them”; “MTV was, roughly speaking, the greatest thing ever.”
Those who loved the author’s debut should enjoy this follow-up.Pub Date: July 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-525-95156-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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