An unbalanced, frequently depressive autobiography that primarily focuses on the past, leaving little room for the author’s...
A Grammy-winning singer/songwriter reveals the early genesis of his family, predating a marriage to Rosanne Cash (whose 2010 memoir, Composed, is a can't-miss) and the ascent to musical stardom.
Crowell’s introduction to the world of country music began early in small-town Texas, when banjo chords and Hank Williams records sweetened a childhood embittered by familial discord. Raised in a house without a bedroom of his own, the author was relegated to sleeping in the family home’s creepy front room, where he became an unwilling witness to his parents’ shouting matches and the violence borne from his father’s drinking binges. Frequently frustrated with the inescapable drama, Crowell recalls disrupting his parents’ raucous New Year’s Eve party in 1955; at age five, he frightened guests away by brandishing the rifle hidden in the hall closet. Years later, the family moved to a ramshackle, “post–World War II housing project” in central Texas that was soon decimated by Hurricane Carla. Crowell lovingly and often drolly describes a gassy grandmother, a banjo-playing grandfather, feuding uncles and Cauzette, his strident, God-fearing mother crippled with double dyslexia, epilepsy and a string of heartbreaking miscarriages. In this same tone, the author also discusses life with his boozy father and the distress of a tough childhood. His mother’s hysterically seething religious convictions and frequent nonchalant requests to fetch feminine-hygiene products tempered their embarrassing public “prizefights.” Yet these rough spots are interspersed with summery recollections of a boyhood spent chumming around and banding together with neighborhood mischief makers, and of his father’s drumming lessons, prepping him to play in his band at age 11, then on to higher heights as a budding musician. While Crowell’s narrative becomes a viscerally powerful diary of a boyhood hobbled by a dysfunctional family, his burgeoning love of music and the fruits of that talent get left behind. Could a follow-up be in the works?
An unbalanced, frequently depressive autobiography that primarily focuses on the past, leaving little room for the author’s resoundingly successful present.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59420-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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