A feel-good biography for Parrotheads; others may want to pass.
The Mayor of Margaritaville gets mythic treatment in an adoring chronicle that looks back at his decadeslong career.
For many, Jimmy Buffett (b. 1946) endures simply as an icon of midlife escapism, forever grinning behind aviator-style sunglasses, beachwear, and his guitar. Former Oregonian sports and culture reporter White (Springsteen: Album by Album, 2014) further cultivates that legend, locating the beginning of Buffett’s unlikely rise to the predilections of a ship-hopping father who once yearned for a life of seafaring adventure. With that tone set, the author explores Buffett’s spawning grounds in and around Mississippi and Alabama with equal awe and wonder. When Buffett was born, notes the author, the town of Mobile was known as the “Mother of Mystics.” Making it as a musician in places like Nashville, New Orleans, and Key West was a mystical feat in and of itself. However affable, Buffett was something of a curious oddity in a town enamored with the sort of darkness embodied in the likes of Kris Kristofferson. But as Buffett’s pals explain, he always had the right mojo. As musician and talent scout Don Light remembers, “ ‘the people liked him.’ Not just the songs, they liked the singer….‘ If it was him and guitar, he could talk all evening.’ ” Fans also liked the freedom that the singer represented. Consequently, he was able to turn his laid-back lyrics and lifestyle into a powerful corporate brand responsible for a slew of chain restaurants, resorts, and assorted merchandise. In White’s account, how Buffett actually managed to become a multimillion-dollar mogul is far less important than the legend and lore behind the man. The author’s subject, however, is conspicuously absent from the career-spanning chronicle. Many of the direct quotes attributed to the artist are actually taken from various concert stages over the years, and they don't illuminate much outside of demonstrating Buffett to be a likable guy.
A feel-good biography for Parrotheads; others may want to pass.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3255-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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