To use a gospel-music term for a hot gig, Guralnick turns the house out.
Elvis Presley’s masterful biographer delivers a brilliant depiction of “Mr. Soul.”
Guralnick, author of the definitive two-volume Presley bio Last Train to Memphis (1994) and Careless Love (1999), has grappled with Sam Cooke before—in his fine 1986 R&B history Sweet Soul Music, in his script for the 2003 VH1 film Legend and in numerous album notes. His magnificent full-length treatment of the great gospel/R&B/pop vocalist was worth the wait. Guralnick follows the Mississippi-born, Chicago-bred singer from his groundbreaking tenure in gospel’s Soul Stirrers through his sudden (and, in gospel circles, controversial) ascent to crossover stardom in the late ’50s. He offers a fascinating portrait of a driven, ambitious African-American performer at work on the “chitlin circuit” and in the lily-white pop business, amid the ferment of the era’s civil-rights conflicts. Guralnick notes that Cooke was also a pathfinding black music entrepreneur: In 1959—the same year Berry Gordy started Motown—he founded his own independent label, SAR, where he midwifed the careers of Bobby Womack, Lou Rawls and Johnnie Taylor. Cooke conquered New York’s Copacabana nightclub and the English concert stage, and became close to such black political and cultural figures as Malcolm X and Cassius Clay; his potential appeared unlimited when he was shot dead in a mystifying incident at a Los Angeles motel in December 1964. Guralnick offers a deeply reported study of this complex man, deftly counterpoising accounts of Cooke’s charm, intelligence and seemingly effortless art with measured accounts of his anger, remoteness, ruthlessness and lifelong womanizing. The author is equally at home with the fine points of the gospel road, the machinations of the record industry and the sweeping political and racial tumult that was a backdrop to Cooke’s meteoric career. The writing is as relaxed, graceful and affecting as a superior Cooke performance. It’s another unsurpassable work by one of music’s most knowledgeable and sensitive chroniclers.
To use a gospel-music term for a hot gig, Guralnick turns the house out.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-37794-5
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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