A courageous and often unsettling look at the not-so-glamorous consequences of being the offspring of a major celebrity.
James Brown’s daughter recounts her conflicted relationship with the “Godfather of Soul.”
Writing with Fisher (Narrative Journalism/Rutgers Univ.; After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival, 2008, etc.), Yamma Brown recalls what it was like to grow up in the shadow of one of the most famous and influential entertainers of all time, James Brown (1933-2006). The author begins at the end by recounting her father’s death and subsequent funeral in 2006, which was held at Harlem’s Apollo Theater with the sort of ostentation and pomp that one would expect from James Brown, even in death. From there, she begins to reconstruct an ambivalent portrait of her father’s life, from his time as a youngster shining shoes in small-town Georgia to his eventual position of power in the entertainment industry and all the trappings of fame and celebrity. But in a somewhat jarring transition, the book goes from rosy recollections of riding ponies on the family ranch to the chapter ominously entitled “Dad’s Beating Mom Again.” Suddenly, the memoir takes a seriously dark turn and never looks back. The young author went about the traumatic business of trying to come to terms with domestic violence from a tender age, watching her father physically abuse two unfortunate wives. But even more depressing is the author’s own near-fatal dealings with physical abuse from her own husband, coming about almost as if it were an inherited trait from her battered mother. In fact, the author’s story of life with her conniving, violent, near-psychopath of a husband begins to overtake the story of her relationship with her father. Unfortunately, it took a near-fatal beating from her lowlife husband before she finally scraped up the courage to leave victimhood behind.
A courageous and often unsettling look at the not-so-glamorous consequences of being the offspring of a major celebrity.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-883052-85-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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