An above-average memoir that itself serves as the musician’s next career chapter.
A rapper shows that her facility with language and revelation extends beyond music.
Though the memoir proceeds pretty much chronologically, it is more like a series of pieces, each with its own focus, than a cohesive narrative. A Minneapolis transplant to New York, raised by a Puerto Rican mother and a Caucasian father, with a degree in philosophy and a background in medical writing, Dessa (Spiral Bound, 2009, etc.) has consistently transcended conventional stereotyping, and her writing should command interest even from readers who know nothing of her work with the Doomtree collective and her solo releases. By her own admission, she came to music late—“in my midtwenties I was old enough to be a retired rapper—inexperienced and without good odds on making it a sustainable career. She succeeded through what she calls “the Tinker Bell model. She’s only real because she is clapped into existence….The Tinker Bell model is the nuclear option. It taps every reserve. It permits no Plan Bs.” Beyond artistic drive, the obsessive undercurrent of this memoir is her on-again, off-again romance with a crewmate (and soul mate?) identified only as X; the relationship was incredibly passionate but so combustible it couldn’t sustain itself. Dessa’s mother and father were equally driven in unorthodox directions, as the former started raising cattle and the latter devoted years to building his own one-man airplane. Some of the narrative is a standard tour diary, what it’s like to be on the road, where, she quotes a Doomtree rapper, you’re “a traveling T-shirt salesman.” She writes of an assignment from the New York Times Magazine in which she was to visit New Orleans like a tourist (so different from visiting as a touring musician), and she writes of her sidelights delivering lectures and performance pieces and of her invitation to contribute to “The Hamilton Mixtape.” It has been a singular career, and it is by no means over.
An above-average memoir that itself serves as the musician’s next career chapter.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4229-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
PROFILES
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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