Both the Haggard fanatic and the casual country music fan will find their appreciation enriched.
An incisive, critical analysis of one of the most complicated and misunderstood artists in country music.
Cantwell describes this as “the attempt of this critic and more or less lifelong Merle Haggard fan at writing a monograph on the man’s music,” admitting that this is not the in-depth, full-scale biography that his subject deserves. As the co-author of Heartaches by the Number: Country Music's 500 Greatest Singles (2003), Cantwell combines sharp critical insights and encyclopedic knowledge of the music with a fan’s passion, as he provides a personal engagement with Haggard’s discography, along with context of the times. The author shows how the politics of the man most famous for “Okie from Muskogee” and the more belligerent “Fightin’ Side of Me” resist pigeonholing and how many contradictions one confronts in his music. He’s a country artist who served time but sang of prison less often than singers who never did. He’s a country artist who sings often of the city and refuses to romanticize the bucolic. He recognizes that the term “Okie” (which he isn’t, though his parents were) is an insult before he turns it into a source of pride (and Cantwell is very good at illuminating the fragility and ambiguity of the pride running through Haggard’s music). Occasionally, the assessment seems a little over-the-top, as the author writes that on his late-’60s albums, “Haggard’s writing is as smart in its way as Dylan’s at the same time or Lennon and McCartney’s, his singing is as powerful as Aretha Franklin’s or Van Morrison’s,” and he proceeds to encompass the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and James Brown in his comparative superlatives. But for an artist who has been dismissed too easily for too long, such perspective provides a dialogue-opening corrective.
Both the Haggard fanatic and the casual country music fan will find their appreciation enriched.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-292-71771-8
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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