A finely crafted portrait of the southern rock group that created some of the 1970s' most appealing and inventive music. Georgia-based journalist Freeman shows great command of both history and southern context in explicating the richly diverse musical sources of the band's sound. He plays it straight and from the top, beginning with the fatherless, troubled Allman brothers in Tennessee and their youthful discovery of black music—Jackie Wilson gave Gregg goosebumps he thought ``were permanent''—then moving on to describe guitarist Duane's developing mastery, Gregg's bluesy voice, and the brothers' adoption of Macon, Ga., as the unlikely site of their musical stand. (As their fame grew, it became the mecca of southern rock.) The Allman Brothers Band changed personnel often, and Freeman tracks a big, biracial cast of hardscrabble, drug-scarfing outlaws who tangled with the Dixie Mafia and even murder when road manager Lydon Twiggs stabbed a club owner who refused to pay them. He focuses primarily on edge-dweller Duane, who soon became one of rock's legendary guitarists (``I took speed every night for three years and practiced'') but died in a motorcycle accident in 1971; enigmatic but feckless Gregg, unable to overcome drug addiction or deal responsibly with women; and mercurial Dickey Betts, the sweet-playing slide guitarist who grew into stardom after Duane's death. Freeman's determination to cover it all—including the dollar value of every contract and child- support judgment—encumbers his story. But for the most part he tells this yarn well, giving the music itself proper pride of place. Though not shy about criticizing the band's bad middle- and late-period recordings, Freeman does a fine a job of making their best music sing for readers. This book will further stimulate the revived interest in the Allmans, who were a surprise hit at Woodstock II.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-29288-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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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