Warm, lively and compassionate.
A Grammy Award–winning Beninese singer/songwriter’s heartfelt memoir, co-authored by Wenrick, about her life as a musician and human rights activist.
Kidjo began her career in entertainment at age 6, when her mother pushed her onto a theater stage and told the little girl to sing. Terrified, the author quickly overcame her fears and realized that she had arrived “home.” The singer began performing with her older brothers and immersing herself in music not only from Benin, but also Togo, France and the United States. Her great artistic awakening came a few years later after she heard Miriam Makeba singing on the radio. The legendary South African singer’s “magical [and] uplifting” voice inspired the young Kidjo to become “just like her.” After high school, Kidjo became a popular solo performer in both Benin and neighboring Togo, but her growing fame also brought her and her family under the scrutiny of an increasingly totalitarian Beninese government. At 23, she fled to Paris, where her path eventually led her to le CIM, the school for jazz. Kidjo pursued her interests in fusions that merged jazz, which fellow students told her “[wasn’t] for Africans,” with traditional African lyrics and rhythms. Her artistic boldness caught the attention of Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, who had discovered such world music icons as Bob Marley and U2. Like most of Blackwell’s protégées, Kidjo also achieved international recognition. Yet it was only after she began doing humanitarian work in Africa for UNICEF that she was finally able to act on her long-standing need to give back to a land that had “given [her] so much.” Richly illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs, Kidjo’s work celebrates one woman’s courage to use her musical gift “to empower people all over the world.”
Warm, lively and compassionate.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-207179-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Design
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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