A breezy, upbeat, and honest reflection of this multitalented artist.
A chart-topping singer/songwriter exposes “the inner workings of my mind and my heart” through this intimate essay collection anchored with music and humor.
A five-time Grammy Award nominee, Bareilles conveys her life and career in a series of heartfelt, confessional ruminations written with the passion with which she hones her musical craft, forming an entertaining and candid scrapbook chockablock with memories, lyrics, stories, and photographs. A tomboy growing up the youngest of three sisters in northern California’s wooded Humboldt County, the author reveled in building haystacks and catching frogs until her parents’ divorce when she was 12, a devastating event that only exacerbated the self-consciousness she felt as the schoolyard “fat kid…the label I was given by my peers.” Getting in shape and becoming active in theater empowered her throughout adolescence and shaped her onstage presence. The chapters are each named for a song in her repertoire: “Gravity” describes a formative and exquisitely crushing encounter with heartbreak, while “Love Song” chronicles the author’s years as a flourishing artist on the singer/songwriter circuit in Los Angeles (she signed her first record deal in 2005). A unique epistolary section called “Beautiful Girl” includes letters to her former selves to exorcise the demons of the past. Mostly sidestepping hackneyed platitudes for true sentiment, the singer remains genuine whether discussing what she learned while writing on a deadline, the development of her recent theatrical adaptation of “Waitress,” or the vulnerability of exposing her life “without the metaphor and mask of music or my singing voice.” Bareilles also demonstrates a sense of humor, much like fellow musician Ben Folds, who admits, in his playful introduction, to initially repurposing one of her “Little Voice” promotional CDs to counterbalance an uneven leg on his entertainment center.
A breezy, upbeat, and honest reflection of this multitalented artist.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2777-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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