Browsing Area Book of the Week February 11, 2013.

The Last Holiday: A Memoir by Gil Scott-Heron.  Library Call Number: PS3569.C7Z46 2012.

     Premier poet and songwriter  and so-called “godfather of rap” Gil Scott-Heron looks back on his life and opens up an illuminating career that ran for decades on the cutting edge of social commentary.  Written in the last few months before his death, the creator of 20 albums and many singles recalls his childhood, his first piano, hauled into his grandmothers Tennessee house by a junk man, his never-to-be-forgotten song, “The Revolution will not be televised,” and insights into many of the most wrenching experiences of the civil rights era.  With a poet’s eye and cadence, he describes decades of the fight for equal rights around the world. 

     As reviewer Ben Ratliff noted in the New York Times Review: “Scott-Heron himself, along with two black classmates, desegregated a Jackson[TN]  junior high school, and he writes lucidly about that experience and its aftermath -- including his mother's decision not to push him into it, and the strangeness of studying the Civil War in a white Southern school: ''It was like reviewing it from the loser's locker room.''