cover image Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man

Gil Scott-Heron: Pieces of a Man

Marcus Baram. St. Martin’s, $26.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-250-01278-4

Best known for his ingenious, cutting, and satiric 1970 song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Scott-Heron (1949–2011) never received full recognition for his brilliant writing across many genres, including poetry and fiction, and his canny weaving of black history into his volatile moment. In this straightforward, honest book, journalist Baram draws a poignant portrait, if somewhat fawning, of the artist as a black man struggling to make sense of his culture from the 1960s to his death. Baram draws on Scott-Heron’s autobiographies—and on his own friendship with Scott-Heron—to chronicle the poet and musician’s journey from his childhood in segregated Jackson, Tenn., and his youth in New York City to his college days at Lincoln University, where he grew increasingly more active in matters related to social justice. Baram then discusses Scott-Heron’s first album, his pivotal and mostly warm relationship with Columbia Records’ president, Clive Davis, and his eventual descent into a world of drug addiction that killed him. A gifted artist, Scott-Heron always deflected attention from himself as he pointed to the long river of people and ideas on whose backs he swam: Baram writes, “There could be no Gil Scott-Heron if there’d been no LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka]... no Langston Hughes, no Paul Dunbar, no Phillis Wheatley.” Baram’s appreciative biography offers a glimpse into the complex feelings and thoughts of this Renaissance man we lost much too soon. (Nov.)