More dross than expected but plenty of genuine gems of insight as well.
The drummer and co-founder of the Roots unpacks the creative process.
Questlove’s Mo’ Meta Blues (2013) was an uncommonly incisive, reflective, and engaging musical memoir. If that was the author’s masterpiece, this is more like the previously unreleased bonus cuts; it lacks the focus and cohesion of the earlier work, mixing the enlightening with the banal. “Early in this book,” he writes in conclusion, “I also said that I don’t know exactly what the goal of a book about creativity should be. My method has been to share stories from my life working on and around many different projects filled with many different ideas, and the goal of that method is to pass on some of that momentum to you.” The author goes behind the scenes of the Tonight Show, where the Roots are the house band, describes the elation that he feels from receiving a good review and the deflation from a bad one (he seems more attuned to reviews than many other artists), and relates the experiences and influences that have impacted his musical development. Unlike Mo’ Meta Blues, this book is presented and organized like a self-help book, one that doesn’t offer readers much help. “We’re going to need a definition of a creative person to go forward,” he writes. “Here’s a first stab at it: a creative person is a person who creates.” The author moves beyond tautology in the most interesting part of the book, in which he explores how the internet has transformed our culture and the very notion of creativity, making us all curators, even of our own identities. “Our brains are changing,” he writes. “They used to be containers. Now they’re retrievers. It’s a fundamental shift.” Questlove is also interested in artists working across platforms and on chefs and food in general (see his previous book, somethingtofoodabout, for more information).
More dross than expected but plenty of genuine gems of insight as well.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267055-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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