Pleasant enough, but in the end little more than a fan's notes.
The author recalls his years on the road with volatile and complex jazz musician Miles Davis.
In 1973, guitarist Murphy received a call to join Davis's entourage. He worked for the trumpet-player off and on through 1983, first as a stagehand and then as road manager, helping with everything from sound systems to procuring women. A startling, innovative talent, Davis began his career with Charley Parker's quintet in the 1940s, then broke away to become the embodiment of “cool jazz” in the ’50s. He reinvented himself several more times, even experimenting with rap before his death in 1991. In the ’70s, Davis rolled the influences of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone into his repertoire, more or less inventing fusion. Many of Davis's loyalists from the good old days hated the extremely loud, amplified band (whose members used a lot of drugs) that Miles presided over during the period Murphy chronicles, but rock fans loved it, making Bitches Brew the bestselling jazz album in history. Murphy does little more here than string together anecdotes, with many a cameo from Bob Dylan to Waylon Jennings to the members of U2, but at least he manages to make Davis come across better than he did in Miles: The Autobiography (1989) and puts into context rumors of his bisexuality. Toward the end of Murphy's gig, Davis is in physical decline, much of it brought on by drug abuse, and these are the best, most affecting pages. Gratifyingly, a strong woman comes into Miles’s life: In part because of Cicely Tyson, Davis made another big comeback in the early ’80s with a series of concerts at the Lincoln Center. Though Murphy has his moments, he’s also quite idiosyncratic: His lengthy comparison of Davis with Ernest Hemingway seems odd at best, and his structure throughout is jagged and unbalanced.
Pleasant enough, but in the end little more than a fan's notes.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56025-361-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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