Excellent social history, bracketing David Talbot’s Season of the Witch (2012) as an indispensable account of a time of...
Searching account of 1960s Southern California, when the wistful innocence of the Beach Boys died alongside the victims of Charles Manson.
It makes sense that the first figure really to take form in McKeen’s (Chair, Journalism/Boston Univ.; Mile Marker Zero: The Moveable Feast of Key West, 2011, etc.) latest book is Murry Wilson, the psychologically tortured, reflexively violent father of Beach Boys Carl, Dennis, and Brian—in fact, the latter was so relentlessly damaged by the shock of a raging parent that, more than half a century later, he is not quite at home in this world. “The boys knew they could stem the brutality with music,” writes McKeen, and so they sang—but also drank, drugged, and did all they could to escape. It was an accident of history that Dennis’ path crossed that of would-be songwriter Charles Manson, whose creepy, ultimately murderous family would invade Dennis’ life and home before committing their infamous acts. In between, McKeen recounts the rise and fall of LA pop-culture icons such as the Byrds, a band born in all sorts of conflict and personality clash even as it projected a flower-power cool: “They wanted to be rock ’n’ roll stars, but they couldn’t decide what would make the band distinctive.” The “star-making machinery,” a line of Joni Mitchell’s that McKeen cheerfully echoes, took in all kinds of disparate characters, from the lost wild child Gram Parsons to the craggy Svengali Kim Fowley. As the author notes, that machinery had no problem with the waiflike Michelle Phillips straddling a couple of dudes in a bathtub on an album cover but recalled it to sticker over the edge of a toilet that had strayed into the picture. McKeen’s book ends near where it begins, with the haunted Wilson family caught up in the terrible vortex of the post-Manson ’70s, when hippies were now objects of fear and bedrooms and barrooms were the sanctuaries of choice.
Excellent social history, bracketing David Talbot’s Season of the Witch (2012) as an indispensable account of a time of beauty and terror.Pub Date: April 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61373-491-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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
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