An expected hurricane downgraded to a pleasant thunderstorm.
The Miami rapper and businessman recounts his rise to fame and controversy.
In his first book, written with the assistance of Martinez-Belkin (co-author: The Autobiography of Gucci Mane, 2017), Ross, founder of the Maybach Music Group, tells us more about Kanye West’s approach to music on one page than about his own across the remainder of the book. When he writes that he “put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears trying to get my career off the ground in Miami,” we take him at his word. After all, he spent 10 years in rap before he found the kind of success he was after. However, readers may never feel this commitment or his stated love for the music. Even when he turns to rap in earnest, it’s not entirely convincing. Furthermore, the author’s gruff, “boss” persona, while successful in his music, comes off as heavy-handed and tiresome in prose form. Still, the book is not without appeal, especially when Ross breaks from his default braggadocio to offer brief moments of meaningful reflection. When an older hustler warned him that he was “either going to be broke, dead or serving a life sentence,” the author explains his failure to heed the warning by recognizing, “I was infatuated with wealth. I was infected with greed.” The real charm of the memoir is the author’s humor. It’s hard not to like a narrator who describes himself this way: “To this day, the Roberts men carry their weight well. I wouldn’t even say we’re fat. We’re just some burly, handsome niggas who smell good.” Passages like this aren’t enough to make an above-average music memoir, but they are enough to get readers to the end of the book, where Ross sums it up, “the truth is, what makes me a boss is not the stories that I tell. It’s the ones that I don’t.”
An expected hurricane downgraded to a pleasant thunderstorm.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-335-99928-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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