Wilkinson strikes exactly the right notes in this deft look at one of America’s towering musical treasures.
An economical, unsentimental, illuminating look at the venerable folk singer.
Veteran New Yorker contributor Wilkinson (The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino, 2007, etc.) here expands a magazine profile of Seeger, who turns 90 this May. The musician asked the journalist to pen a book that could be read in one sitting, and we see a pleasingly close-up view as he rattles around the Beacon, N.Y., cabin he built with his own hands. The author gracefully reveals the arc of Seeger’s life and career. Born into a privileged, musical family, as a youth the musician gained a love for American folk music, facility on the five-string banjo and a commitment to political and social causes. He dropped out of Harvard to play with folk icon Woody Guthrie and work with folklorist John Lomax at the Library of Congress. After some time on the road, Seeger was embraced as a performer—first by the American left as a member of the Almanac Singers and then by pop listeners as part of the hitmaking quartet the Weavers, who notched a No. 1 hit in 1950 with “Goodnight, Irene.” The core of the book focuses on his victimization during the Joseph McCarthy witch hunts, when his ex-Communist background led to the Weavers’ blacklisting and Seeger’s appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which resulted in a contempt of Congress conviction that was later overturned. Effectively shut out of performing on television for a decade, Seeger nonetheless became the dean of the American folk-music movement, thanks to his fearless and principled work on behalf of the nuclear-disarmament, civil-rights, antiwar and environmental movements. Here he emerges as a quiet, matter-of-fact yet hard-headed and courageous individual with a rare gift for drawing listeners of all ages into his songs, and a political boldness as understated as it is uncompromising.
Wilkinson strikes exactly the right notes in this deft look at one of America’s towering musical treasures.Pub Date: May 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-26995-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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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