A profound autobiographical playlist and radically political call to action primarily for Amos fans.
The inimitable musician memorializes her artistic journey through music and activism.
With great conviction, Amos believes “we are all confronting dark forces that aim to divide us as a world, as countries, as people, as artists, as creators.” This book is rooted in motivated political resistance and the preservation of artistic expressionism. As a 40-year veteran of the music industry, the author acknowledges pivotal moments throughout her career and lets her song lyrics shine at the beginning of each chapter. Amos begins with “Gold Dust,” reflecting back on her teenage self and the creative impulses that guided her as a young artist and a rising social and human rights activist. The author discusses how the “weight of processing conflict” fueled the writing of her hit “Little Earthquakes” and how the 2017 song “Bang” was intended to energize advocates of true democracy after Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. Never one to shy away from the controversial, complex, or incendiary, Amos expresses past and present frustrations with record label melodrama and the importance of continuing conversations about sexual abuse, female genital mutilation, government oppression, and attacks on LGBTQ rights worldwide. A section on 9/11 comes into vivid focus when Amos describes an eerie walk through a muted Manhattan as “the drums of war had begun beating." She continues, “as I write these words all these years later, we are still at war—in that very same war.” In addition to her politically charged thoughts, the author reflects poignantly on the end-of-life care and eventual loss of her mother, which occurred while she was writing this book. The concluding chapters address her grief and how she has been processing this absence by manifesting her beloved mother’s influence through prose and music. Though the narrative structure is haphazard, the result, nevertheless, is a dramatically inspired volume of lyrics and legacy presenting Amos as an artist, an activist, and a sharp, thoughtful musician with a commanding voice. One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.
A profound autobiographical playlist and radically political call to action primarily for Amos fans.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0415-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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