A life as haunting as the music, and a biography that comes very close to doing it justice. (16 b&w photos)
Sex, drugs, and rhythm and blues punctuate this tormenting story of one of Motown’s greatest voices.
Turner keeps a keen eye on Gaye’s family throughout his biography, beginning with the family’s roots in Jessamine County, Kentucky, and Gaye’s cross-dressing father. After a brief stint in the US Air Force, notable mostly for encounters with Wyoming prostitutes and an honorable discharge from service, Gaye met his mentor Harvey Fuqua, and his singing career slowly blossomed. Eventually catching up with Berry Gordy and the fledgling Motown label, Gaye’s rise to the top was complicated by racist encounters on tour, a troubled marriage to Gordy’s sister Anna, an illegitimate child (fathered with his wife’s niece), and the untimely death (from a brain tumor) of singing partner Tammi Terrell. Excessive drug use led to paranoid delusions of persecution and increasing financial difficulties (from failure to pay child support to dunning by the IRS). The author balances these depictions of Gaye’s troubled personal life with a measured exploration of his singing career, including the commercial success of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and the artistic accomplishments of “What’s Going On.” It all came to a sudden end when Gaye was murdered by his father (following a domestic dispute) in 1984—a tragedy that halted a career still vibrant from the recent successes of the single “Sexual Healing” and the album “Midnight Love.” Turner presents a fair and even-handed account of his subject’s life, neither withholding Gaye’s negative qualities (such as blatant misogyny) nor failing to develop a full picture of his musical genius. A stronger editor would have weeded out a few missteps, such as the author’s bizarre digressions into John Steinbeck’s reactions to Beaumont, Texas, and an empty comparison between Gaye and John Lennon.
A life as haunting as the music, and a biography that comes very close to doing it justice. (16 b&w photos)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019821-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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