…a…compelling portrait of a massively influential musician whose genius did not suddenly emerge after he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966, but rather evolved during endless nights of gigging in backwater juke joints and dive bars from Nashville to New York City.
more.
[Flip] Wilson was a more troubled person than his easy and attractive onstage demeanor would suggest. But he was also a more serious and committed one, who studied comedy like a science and performed it as an art. Part of the first wave of black comedians to break the color line, he arrived during the sociocultural crack in time we call the mid-’60s. He straddled that crack for a while, and then it swallowed him.
more.
Still, it’s doubtful we would have this book had Kennedy’s second son not become a beloved hero the world over. Joe Kennedy conceded as much. “As I sit in my office and try to dig out from all the correspondence, I am realizing how insignificant it is compared to the fact that I am now the father of the President of the United States,” he wrote in 1961. “I will probably just let the history of my life stand as it stands, and I am quite sure that nobody will care a damn.” Nasaw certainly does…he reminds us in “The Patriarch” of the importance of the elder Kennedy’s life apart from the triumphs of his more famous sons…Nasaw delves deep into archives, reconstructing virtually from scratch a multifaceted…portrait of a figure who was for decades near the center of power in Hollywood and Washington, finance and diplomacy.
more.
Yukio Mishima is about as famous as he is infamous. The enormous body of work left behind almost outshines his shocking public suicide after taking hostages with the help of his personal nationalist militia at a Self-Defense Forces base. In Persona, the first biography of Mishima to appear in English in over thirty years and the first translated into English from Japan, Naoki Inose and Hiroaki Sato take an extremely lengthy and detailed account of this paradoxical figure of modern Japanese literature.
more.
Not only has Plath’s small oeuvre spawned an ever-flourishing worldwide industry of biographical interpretation, but her writing so seamlessly fused self-obsession with an otherworldly gift for language that, on reading, it’s impossible to differentiate between scholarly interest and “curiosity of quite a low order” in one’s mind. This entrancing quality, this perfect, irreproducible formula of unadulterated narcissism and true genius, is what sustains her place in the spotlight…
more.
Please don’t misunderstand me. Having affairs is wrong, and this one is particularly wrong. Petraeus has blown up his family, a family that no doubt had to make significant sacrifices for his career. Broadwell is obviously not a serious journalist, and deserves to be pilloried for sleeping with a biography subject. The whole mess is awful. But not nearly as awful as the response. The latest news this morning is that John Allen, the commander of forces in Afghanistan, may be embroiled. So the man who is most responsible for the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan will be distracted by a bunch of high-school bullshit in Washington. It is obviously a diseased morality that has no problem with secretive unrestricted assassination by drones but goes hysterical over minor sexual indiscretion. It’s so obviously nonsense that I think there may be cause of some crazy hope in the Petraeus scandal. It may force the United States to grow up in its relationship to sex and public servants.
At his height, Lobo single-handedly controlled global sugar prices, counted Napoleon’s molar teeth among his collectible treasures, and hobnobbed, if not always by choice, with Che Guevera…
more.
Drawing on…unpublished correspondence with contemporaries and friends like [Langston] Hughes, Claude McKay, Carl Van Vechten, Dorothy West, Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke, and presenting a unique interpretation of his poetic gifts, And Bid Him Sing is the first full-length critical biography of this…American writer.
more.
Born into slavery in Texas, he fled from his owner during the Civil War and lived with Indians, honing his skills until he was chosen for what turned out to be a very long and very successful career as a deputy U.S. Marshall…
more.
…from…musical experimentation to excessive and extravagant sessions and tours…the chapters amiably wind through the glitz and glory into darker territory…Then it backtracks through his childhood in India and Africa (he was born Farrokh Bulsara in 1946 in the British protectorate of Zanzibar) through his early adulthood as an art student and aspiring professional musician…
more.
“American Tapestry,” a fascinating account of the first lady’s family, corrects the omission of race from the Obama White House. No political memoir has ever looked or sounded like this one: the book spans several generations of Mrs. Obama’s people and reads like a panorama of black life.
more.
…despite the bewildering role that chance played in Mr. Obama’s story, he has been very much the author of his own life — an outsider, who, in the very American tradition of literary heroes like Gatsby, “raised himself” and forged an identity through a series of self-conscious and deliberate choices.
more.
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art: photo of the President at The White House by Mark Seliger, 2011
Blake Lively is too fierce for us!
Kenecia Li
Shao Fan. Grandmother Rabbit, 2012. Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm.
Tupac
I went to a graduation today and my hair still looks awesome. Also I got to wear a dress with...
MOREHOUSE COLLEGE CLASS OF 2013
Cherish - Stop Calling Me
![[Flip] Wilson was a more troubled person than his easy and attractive onstage demeanor would suggest. But he was also a more serious and committed one, who studied comedy like a science and performed it as an art. Part of the first wave of black comedians to break the color line, he arrived during the sociocultural crack in time we call the mid-’60s. He straddled that crack for a while, and then it swallowed him.
more.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/68deefff1d62dbe0c10052e7d04fb1d9/tumblr_mmapyv3fku1qcwnv4o1_500.jpg)
![Drawing on…unpublished correspondence with contemporaries and friends like [Langston] Hughes, Claude McKay, Carl Van Vechten, Dorothy West, Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke, and presenting a unique interpretation of his poetic gifts, And Bid Him Sing is the first full-length critical biography of this…American writer.
more.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbbwjfBnha1qcwnv4o1_500.jpg)
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