Uncertain in organization and thin on insight—a blown opportunity.
A veteran reggae observer offers her take on an icon’s defining statement.
Goldman (Bob Marley, 1981) seems perfectly situated to write a compelling fly-on-the-wall book about the late reggae star’s 1977 album Exodus (named “Album of the Century” by Time magazine in 1999). Formerly features editor for the defunct British music weekly Sounds, she interviewed Marley frequently in Jamaica (where she stayed in his home for a time) and London, attended sessions for Exodus and accompanied the Wailers on their ’77 European tour. She takes a muddled trek through an interesting story. Goldman’s digressive account is mired by the enormous amount of backstory she must tell: Marley’s long apprenticeship in the island’s music business, the finer points of the Rastafarian faith and its connection with Judeo-Christian thought and the tangled and violent intrigues of ’70s Jamaican politics. A third of the book has gone by before Goldman arrives at her tale’s flashpoint event: the politically motivated December 1976 attempt on Marley’s life at his Kingston home, which led to his flight to London. There, the Wailers undertook studio work that resulted in not one but two albums, Exodus and its lightweight 1978 sequel Kaya (which she deals with only in passing). Despite a wealth of firsthand knowledge and copious new interviews, Goldman fails to bring the reader closer to an understanding of the record—a compelling mix of spiritual anthems and blissful love songs—or the deepest motivations of the artist who created it. A labored look at interpretations of the biblical exodus through artistic history stops the book dead in its middle section, while observations about the intersection of punk and reggae similarly bog it down near the end. An anecdote-studded track-by-track analysis of the album is no better than what one finds in other making-of tomes by less-savvy musical trainspotters.
Uncertain in organization and thin on insight—a blown opportunity.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-5286-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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