The Last Holiday
Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream. And Stevie Wonder had a dream. This is a book about dreams.' In the autumn of 1980, Stevie Wonder invited Gil Scott-Heron to join him on a forty-one-city tour across America, ending in Washington in January 1981, to gather popular support for the creation of a holiday in honour of the great civil-rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. Scott-Heron uses this history-making tour as the backbone of his memoir. A compelling testament to Gil Scott-Heron's career and achievements, The Last Holiday is full of Scott-Heron's keen insights into the music industry, the civil rights movement, modern America, governmental hypocrisy and our wider place in the world.
3.2 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Music, Stage & Screen |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
384 |
| RRP |
£20.00 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-0857863010 |
| Publisher |
Canongate |
| |
Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream. And Stevie Wonder had a dream. This is a book about dreams.' In the autumn of 1980, Stevie Wonder invited Gil Scott-Heron to join him on a forty-one-city tour across America, ending in Washington in January 1981, to gather popular support for the creation of a holiday in honour of the great civil-rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. Scott-Heron uses this history-making tour as the backbone of his memoir. A compelling testament to Gil Scott-Heron's career and achievements, The Last Holiday is full of Scott-Heron's keen insights into the music industry, the civil rights movement, modern America, governmental hypocrisy and our wider place in the world.
Read an extract from the book | Independent
Reviews
The Los Angeles Times
Lynell George
"Just as Scott-Heron was neither "vegetable" nor "mineral," it's fitting perhaps that "The Last Holiday" eludes a standard definition. Nor will it explain the "whys" of the latter years, but it is true to the man who shrugged off the limits of labels. Though, nearing the conclusion of the book, there are hints of darkness, his later interior struggle, he decided that this was the story he wanted to tell, one that is less official accounting than one long, open-hearted solo."
29/01/2012
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The Sunday Times
Rob Fitzpatrick
"... this is far beyond a usual, anecdote-heavy memoir. In one sense the book, which was still unfinished at his death, is series of love letters; first to his grandmother, then later to his mother, then ultimately to Wonder himself, who performed on the night John Lennon was shot with “[tears] flowing freely down his face onto his clothes, tears he never bothered to wipe away”. Scott-Heron is such a fine writer (New York was “as cold as a whore’s heart”; the young Michael Jackson dances like “a boneless ice-skater”) you are swept up in each new romance."
15/01/2012
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The New York Times
Dwight Garner
"This memoir reads a bit like Langston Hughes filtered through the scratchy and electrified sensibilities of John Lee Hooker, Dick Gregory and Spike Lee. For a relatively slim book, this one gets a lot of things said, not just about Scott-Heron’s own life but also about America in the second half of the 20th century."
09/01/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Fiona Sturges
"The Last Holiday may be disjointed and incomplete, but is also engaging and immensely human. And it is made all the more affecting with the knowledge of the calamities that were yet to come."
08/01/2012
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The Independent
Bernadine Evaristo
"In early chapters he writes with such stylish exuberance and conversational ease that massive overdoses of alliteration can be forgiven. (His grandmother is "predictable, patient, perceptive, persistent, proud, private and practical".) He creates some memorable scenes, such as his formidable mother's triumph over the disciplinary committee at school. But later sections read like the disjointed recollections of someone who can't think straight. There are many frustrating gaps in the storytelling, albeit explained by the publisher's postscript: this memoir has been pieced together from fragments of his writings stretching back to the 1990s. Unfortunately, it shows."
20/01/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Tom Horan
"If The Last Holiday can be frustrating in its lack of candour about aspects of himself, it comes beautifully to life when he is describing others. Stevie Wonder emerges as a man of greater vision than most who have their sight; the moment Wonder announces to a packed arena that John Lennon has been killed is extraordinarily charged; Michael Jackson’s visit to the tour lovingly evokes the magical aura of his youth."
16/01/2012
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The Sunday Telegraph
Ben Thompson
"The passages of The Last Holiday that really work — which is most of them — are pretty much all conventional first-person recollections of the author’s upbringing, family and education ... his descriptions of growing up in Jackson, Tennessee, and his subsequent musical and literary educations in the fiery crucible of the Sixties civil rights struggle are as crisp as they are vivid ... Unfortunately, all of Scott-Heron’s subtlety and wit seem to desert him whenever The Last Holiday’s initial template hoves into view. From the abysmal poem about King with which the book opens, to the (mercifully) brief third person “Interlude”, in which “The Artist” is finally given free rein (and runs straight into a tree), the huge disparity in quality between this book’s two competing narrative thrusts is a psychological mystery Sigmund Freud himself might have struggled to get to the bottom of."
11/01/2012
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The New York Times
Ben Ratliff
"In his time, he was a great artist; when he started writing this book, his time, as well as some of his curiosity, was over. I don’t know if we can expect him to be great in a book that he only half inhabited."
13/01/2012
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