Mostly engaging and will hold greatest appeal to readers who are already fans of Touré, Prince or both.
Interpretive exegesis of the songs and style of the artist formerly and currently known as Prince.
Touré (Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now, 2011, etc.) argues that though Prince was chronologically a late boomer, he became an icon for Generation X, people born between 1965 and 1982, a time of lower birthrates and social anomie. Prince’s own difficult, lonely childhood gave him the ambition and remove to forge a rock-funk hybrid that was both spiritual and highly sexual, and this gave him an iconic appeal to the disillusioned demographic that came of age in the 1980s, during Prince’s run of hit albums beginning with "1999." In support of this, Touré discusses the content of many of Prince’s songs, focusing more on the responses to Prince’s work than on what Prince actually did to create it. Touré also discusses Prince’s relationship with his backing musicians, significant to his thesis since Prince was one of the first rock stars to recruit a fully diverse band. Although the author talked to other scholars, Prince’s collaborators and former lovers, he’s not pursuing a concrete look at the nitty-gritty of Prince’s innovations in the studio or a narrative of his career arc’s sharp rise (and moderate decline). Instead, he offers a broad overview of Prince’s life and career, tied to his own ideas about demography and race. Touré spends lots of pages of this slim volume returning to his meditations on the qualities of Generation X relative to Prince—e.g., “It’s appropriate to critique the media vision of gen X as unfairly whitewashed, but to say that Blacks are not part of gen X is short-sighted”—and this aspect of his approach comes to seem repetitive and dated.
Mostly engaging and will hold greatest appeal to readers who are already fans of Touré, Prince or both.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0549-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 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
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