More dross than expected but plenty of genuine gems of insight as well.
The drummer and co-founder of the Roots unpacks the creative process.
Questlove’s Mo’ Meta Blues (2013) was an uncommonly incisive, reflective, and engaging musical memoir. If that was the author’s masterpiece, this is more like the previously unreleased bonus cuts; it lacks the focus and cohesion of the earlier work, mixing the enlightening with the banal. “Early in this book,” he writes in conclusion, “I also said that I don’t know exactly what the goal of a book about creativity should be. My method has been to share stories from my life working on and around many different projects filled with many different ideas, and the goal of that method is to pass on some of that momentum to you.” The author goes behind the scenes of the Tonight Show, where the Roots are the house band, describes the elation that he feels from receiving a good review and the deflation from a bad one (he seems more attuned to reviews than many other artists), and relates the experiences and influences that have impacted his musical development. Unlike Mo’ Meta Blues, this book is presented and organized like a self-help book, one that doesn’t offer readers much help. “We’re going to need a definition of a creative person to go forward,” he writes. “Here’s a first stab at it: a creative person is a person who creates.” The author moves beyond tautology in the most interesting part of the book, in which he explores how the internet has transformed our culture and the very notion of creativity, making us all curators, even of our own identities. “Our brains are changing,” he writes. “They used to be containers. Now they’re retrievers. It’s a fundamental shift.” Questlove is also interested in artists working across platforms and on chefs and food in general (see his previous book, somethingtofoodabout, for more information).
More dross than expected but plenty of genuine gems of insight as well.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267055-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
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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