A complex take on the often simplified topic of contemporary manhood, with relevance to current cultural controversies...
A meditative memoir by a first-generation Colombian-American who forged personal identity through music, faith, and fatherhood.
In his debut, NPR cultural critic Vidal synthesizes cultural critique and personal history, attempting to understand how his generation of African-American and Latinx men have transcended expectations and stereotypes to establish family and community structures as the titular “rap dads.” His initial intent, he writes, “was to chronicle my journey to manhood and fatherhood and what it has meant to me as an artist.” He vividly recalls his own rambunctious South Florida childhood, which included an absent father with a criminal reputation and his own dabbling in delinquency, culminating in a disciplinary year exiled to his relatives in Colombia. This fueled an interest in spirituality, which led to a stint with a youthful, Christian hip-hop collective; while his group toured and recorded, they found it hard to break through. “By the time I hit twenty-two,” he writes, “I already felt ancient.” Despite thwarted ambitions, he pursued music even as he married and had the first of three children, admitting, “doubt crept into my gut. I carried it around the way my wife clung to joyful anticipation.” Eventually, he transitioned from performing music to writing about it, necessity and enthusiasm fueling a career as an editor and freelancer. Vidal captures the serenity and enthusiasm fatherhood engendered in his peers: “Now we shot hoops and curbed our language, our kids orbiting us like small planets.” He varies this narrative with cogent discussions of (and sometimes with) key rap figures like Nas, Chuck D, and Jay-Z, noting, “it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that hip-hop helped raise me.” Vidal’s writing on diverse topics is thoughtful and sometimes funny, but his focus on personal experiences can be repetitive, with narrative aspects that can peter out or seem generalized.
A complex take on the often simplified topic of contemporary manhood, with relevance to current cultural controversies regarding immigration and identity.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6939-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
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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