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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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