A good enough introduction to Roxon, but much less interesting than she was.
Australian journalist Milliken resurrects the woman who shaped how Americans think about rock ’n’ roll.
Lillian Roxon was born in 1932 on the Italian Riviera to Jewish parents. They fled the Nazis and moved to Australia when she was eight. Eventually, Roxon found her calling in journalism and, in 1959, headed to America, where she would live until her death from asthma at age 41. Not only did she shoot to the top in rock writing, cementing her spot as grande dame with the 1969 publication of Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia, but she also wrote about pop feminism and contributed a sex column to Mademoiselle. Contemporaries likened her to Dorothy Parker—only Roxon, they said, was nicer, warmer. Drawing on many primary sources, including Roxon’s papers in Sydney’s Mitchell Library, Milliken is able to offer a sense of his subject’s emotional life. We read about Roxon’s tangles with her mother, the fraught friendship with Linda Eastman (which ended when she became Linda McCartney and dropped Roxon), and her difficult relationship with Germaine Greer. The last third of the text comprises a selection of Roxon’s own writing, including her wonderful, controversial 1970 essay “There is a Tide in the Affairs of Women.” This biography isn’t all-out superficial, but Milliken hasn’t exactly plumbed the depths either. For example, the author touches on Roxon’s anxiety about being overweight, but doesn’t discuss how body image shaped her relationships and her feminism. Indeed, Milliken strains in a somewhat toadying fashion to establish Roxon’s importance, a task that interferes with telling her life story. Even the subtitle is a bit grandiose: Roxon was not the “mother of rock” but a fan and a critic—culture-maker, sure, but not mama.
A good enough introduction to Roxon, but much less interesting than she was.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56025-671-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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