by Victor Bockris & Roberta Bayley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1999
Lou Reed and Keith Richards biographer Bockris offers the first full-length portrait of —70s rock icon Patti Smith, a woman whose charismatic live shows and uncompromising music earned her the moniker “The High Priestess of Punk.” As a poet-turned-rock-critic-turned-musician, as a friend of Bob Dylan, best friend of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and as a lover of playwright/actor Sam Shepard and Basketball Diaries author Jim Carroll, Smith was in the hub of the vibrant New York arts scene throughout the —70s. Bockris concentrates heavily on that angle, slipping in famous names wherever possible and writing extensively about himself in the “Seventh Heaven” chapter, named after Smith’s first published collection of poetry, which Bockris and his then partner, Andrew Wylie, were responsible for bringing to the public. But then it’s also worth noting that Bockris obviously had no contact with Smith for this book. It’s interesting to note because Smith, since returning to the public eye in 1996 after a long absence, has not been reclusive. Smith’s lack of involvement with Bockris greatly diminishes the reader’s feeling of gaining access to her life. Even more importantly, one can’t help but think that if one truly wanted to learn about Smith, one would be better off picking up any one of the number of interviews she’s granted, or last year’s book The Complete Patti Smith, a collection of her lyrics, other writings, and photographs. There, in her complete works, music fans see how Smith, as a musician, has influenced acts from Nirvana to U2 to R.E.M. Also there, in her own words, is the strength she’s shown as a person, in overcoming the deaths of her husband, best friend (Mapplethorpe) and brother (Todd) in the span of a year. Smith is indeed a worthy subject for a biography. But she and her many fans deserve better than this sometimes sensationalistic, second-hand account of her life.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-82363-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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