Music critic Scherman (editor, The Rock Musician, not reviewed, etc.) presents the story of drummer Earl Palmer, one of the foundational figures in rock, who witnessed the changes in race relations and the world of popular music from the vaudeville days to the present. Scherman provides the introduction to each chapter of this biography, and then presents transcriptions from his 125 hours of taped interviews with Palmer. This allows Palmer’s particular blend of New Orleans black dialect and vaudevillian wordplay to take center stage in the story of his life. Recounting everything from his very earliest memories of New Orleans’s Treme neighborhood in the 1920s and ’40s up through the rock scene of the 1980s, Palmer presents a very personal overview of the century. While his worthiness as a biographical figure rests largely on his work with such notables as Ritchie Valens, the Righteous Brothers, Tina Turner, the Beach Boys, and dozens of other rock musicians, he also worked with jazz luminaries like Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, and Dizzy Gillespie, and thus is able to offer a look at the intersection of these musical realms. Unfortunately, nearly half the book is spent on the minor details of his early life, prior to his arrival in the halls of fame. The oral style also doesn—t serve the book well: Palmer has a tendency to ramble (reading occasionally to a page containing two and three short, vaguely related anecdotes). Palmer’s speech is also far from G-rated; among many crudities are such recollections as “I got bombed off homemade vodka and fucked one of the only chicks that wasn—t big and fat.” Somehow, this fails to seem charming. The final sections detailing his work with major musicians are more engaging and funny, as when he says incredibly of a recording session with rock superstar Neil Young, “I—m telling you, man, I don—t remember it.” While the discussions of rock’s formative years make for interesting reading, Palmer’s personal story does not, and this book will probably appeal most to rock history completists. (32 b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56098-844-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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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