Part elegy, part master-student story, part road-trip Americana, Williams riffs on the dichotomy between appearance and...
Williams (The Mimic’s Own Voice, 2011) hits the road with bluesmen Brother Ben and Silent Sam.
"[S]moking dynamite and drinking TNT," Brother Ben makes magic moaning the blues and slide-fingering a beat-up guitar. Ben, the last "True Delta Bluesman," works with sideman Silent Sam Stamps, who wrings a blues harp till it cries like his hero, Sonny Boy Williamson. Brother Ben is Wilton Mabry, his real identity employed as the name of the pair’s parsimonious manager. Silent Sam is Peter Owens, a Big Ten cum laude graduate, middle-class boy captured by the blues wailing on Detroit radio direct from the Delta. In the year 2000, working to keep the Brother Ben legend alive with a 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham and thrift store two-for-a-dollar polyester flares and iridescent shirts, the duo leave Los Angeles and wander coast to coast playing roots music. Brother Ben’s fans bring him pints of Old Crow, but Ben prefers steamed vegetables, green tea, brown rice and his Volvo. For talkative, curious Peter, Silent Sam’s also an act, all shuffle and jive, yas suh, while worrying "[t]hat the act doesn’t ruin how much the music means to me." While this is a road-trip story, it’s also a more profound experience—a sometimes-sardonic, sophisticated take on race in America, on fame, on mostly white artistic wannabes and acolytes co-opting black experience. There’s the Canadian investor replicating a Delta juke joint in Las Vegas; and Audrey and April, attempting to bed every circuit-riding blues musician; and the poseur rappers, N2K Posse, sampling Brother Ben for their hook. With allusions to cultural touchstones from Elvis to Robert Johnson, from Cosby to Oscar Wilde, Williams’ metaphorical tale addresses the dualities African-Americans navigate in the American cultural maze while also dealing with the truths we all tell ourselves and the truths we let others see.
Part elegy, part master-student story, part road-trip Americana, Williams riffs on the dichotomy between appearance and reality.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9884804-4-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Curbside Splendor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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