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FIRST TIME EVER

Name: FIRST TIME EVER
Author: Peggy Seeger
ISBN: 978-0-571-33679-1

A MEMOIR

by Peggy Seeger ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2017

A quirky, unique, and fabulously memorable memoir.

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A British-American musician reflects on her long life and colorful career as a folk singer.

Seeger (b. 1935) grew up in a musically gifted “family of left-wingers.” Her father was a musicologist who regularly consorted with the likes of Alan Lomax and Lead Belly; her mother was a music teacher, composer, and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient; and her half brother, Pete, was a highly regarded folk singer and social activist. As middle class as her upbringing was, the author also remembers it as “strangely free—few dos and fewer don’ts.” A lively teenager who played numerous instruments including the banjo, Seeger attended, but did not graduate from, Radcliffe College. While a student in Boston, she took part in the emerging folk music scene. In 1955, she left to live in the Netherlands. A phone call from Alan Lomax in England brought her to London in 1956, where she immersed herself in the burgeoning folk music scene of which Lomax was part. Almost immediately, she met and began an affair with English musician Ewan MacColl, who was 20 years older and married. Together, they formed an unconventional, peripatetic union that produced three children; seminal documentary collaborations with the BBC called the Radio Ballads; the Critics Group, a master class for young singers interested in learning the art of folk music; and numerous albums now considered classics of the folk genre. Their intense, sometimes-difficult personal relationship also inspired MacColl to write “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” a song made famous in the early 1970s by Roberta Flack. Spanning the U.S., Europe, Asia, and a personal evolution toward feminism and bisexuality, this free-spirited recollection of eight decades steeped in joy, sorrow, and harrowing tragedy celebrates Seeger’s experiences while reveling in the free-spirited “Of-Course-Why-Not” philosophy that has governed her life. It’s a remarkable life story well told.

A quirky, unique, and fabulously memorable memoir.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-571-33679-1

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.