Wry memoir from an Eastern European indie-rock sensation.
A significant strength of this literary debut from singer Simone—whose second full-length original album will be released this fall—is her prose style, which is vibrant, taut and humorous. Born in Ukraine, she emigrated with her family to Massachusetts in the waning days of Soviet rule, after her professor father ran afoul of the KGB. The author amusingly portrays this experience as having transformed her family into caustic Kafkaesque eccentrics. The young Simone’s response was to retreat into bohemian creativity. One chapter documents the bittersweet review of artsy VHS tapes she made with a teenage pal who went on to fame in the Dresden Dolls. The author married young and pursued a career making independent folk-rock that, for a number of years, seemed cursed. After a particularly futile and creepy audition, she writes, “There is a certain peace that comes with the realization you aren’t ruining anyone’s life but your own.” Yet, over time, Simone managed to build an enthusiastic, cultish audience, bolstered in 2008 with her release of an album honoring Yanka Dyagileva, a Russian folk-punk performer who’d died mysteriously. The most provocative and engaging chapters document the author’s wanderlust. In addition to touring the country, playing her music in run-down venues, she traveled on multiple occasions to Siberia, her remote hometown and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. At points, she departs on spiritual tangents, as when she discusses her obsessive research on the Skoptsy, an obscure 19th-century Russian sect that practiced castration—she found this a good conversational topic for discouraging nightclub suitors. The chapters that focus on her travails as a Brooklyn-based aspiring musician are both less interesting and more familiar than Simone seems to perceive. The author skillfully captures the forlorn waiting-to-be-famous existence of young creative people, yet these passages become somewhat self-indulgent and unsurprising.
Pub Date: June 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-86547-915-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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