A vivid, vigorous memoir that every budding musician should read.
An American composer and saxophonist recounts a long, extraordinarily accomplished life in music.
Born in 1944, Threadgill grew up in a Chicago whose airwaves were as catholic as they came: “I remember Mexican music, country music (which people used to call ‘hillbilly’ back then), jazz, rhythm and blues, boogie-woogie, plus regular programming including radio plays, detective shows, and science fiction.” All that, plus the gospel of the likes of Mahalia Jackson and the world music pioneered by none other than DJ Studs Terkel. Threadgill might have fallen victim to the mean streets of the South Side, where he got into his share of scrapes and police officers shot to kill. “People talk about being scared—they don’t know what being scared is,” he writes. “I was running for my motherfucking life.” Enlisting in the Army as a musician, he was promised soft postings until he managed to bring heat down on the brass for a unique arrangement of the national anthem, whereupon he was packed off to Vietnam. His recollections from the battlefront are immediate and affecting. “I played both clarinet and alto saxophone, depending on the circumstances,” he writes. “But in terms of my situation, the key word was ‘infantry.’ ” After his discharge in 1969, Threadgill began putting together one stylistically revolutionary act after another, from Air to Zooid, playing with Sun Ra, James White and the Blacks, John Cale, and Cecil Taylor, and absorbing lessons from—while avoiding imitating—the likes of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. The author is both encouraging and stern, as when he counsels, “If you haven’t had a love affair with the music, I don’t know what you’re doing in it.” More than that, he urges readers to innovate, improvise, and widen their horizons—for example, follow the Cuban model, studying percussion along with whatever instrument one chooses.
A vivid, vigorous memoir that every budding musician should read.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781524749071
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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