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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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