An inspiring, satisfying book affirming the author’s “immense” debt to African American music and how it changed his life.
The ghostwriter of autobiographies by Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and numerous other musical greats tells his own story of faith and recovery.
In this winning, remarkably candid memoir, Ritz (co-author, with Jessi Colter: An Outlaw and a Lady: A Memoir of Music, Life with Waylon, and the Faith That Brought Me Home, 2017, etc.) turns the table on himself. At 75, after capturing some three dozen voices for celebrity autobiographies, he recounts his life and career as a freelancer, songwriter, and author; his personal struggles with multiple addictions; and his eventual acceptance of Jesus, whose spirit he encountered over the past 45 years through the voices of musicians. “The divinity in music…has sustained me,” he writes. Born into a turbulent New York family (his blue-collar father, an outspoken Marxist intellectual and music lover, confided that he was cheating on David’s mother), Ritz flirted briefly with academia (the critic Leslie Fiedler was a grad school mentor), worked in advertising, and then, in his early 30s, convinced singer Ray Charles to collaborate on a memoir. Ritz continued to co-write books with musicians he admired, mainly African Americans raised on gospel music—many were preachers’ kids—and found himself gaining “Christ consciousness” in conversations with devout performers like B.B. King, Etta James (she asked Ritz to pray with her), Smokey Robinson, and others. Bored by his parents’ Judaism and grappling with bisexuality, a pot habit, and a speech impediment, the author gradually found self-acceptance through his “rapport with Jesus.” Ritz captures all of this in vivid, deeply felt prose that traces dysfunctions in his birth family and marriage, his work with blues and country singers, his pursuit of therapy and 12-step programs, and his present belief that “God is the groove.”
An inspiring, satisfying book affirming the author’s “immense” debt to African American music and how it changed his life.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7715-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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