Princess Noire - The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone.

Nadine Cohodas

Pantheon Books

2010

432 páginas

14h 24m

ISBN-13: 9780375424014

Tapping into newly unearthed material - including stories of family and career - Nadine Cohodas gives to the reader a portrait of the singer who was born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, one of eight children in a proud black family. She is shown as a prodigiously talented child who is trained in classical piano through the charitable auspices of a local white woman. She suffers devastating disappointment when she is rejected by the Curtis Institute of Music - a dream deferred that would forever shape her self-image as well as her music. Yet by 1959 - now calling herself Nina Simone - she had sung New York City’s venerable Town Hall and was on her way. Cohodas weaves in the central factors of her life and career - her relationship with her audiences; her involvement in and contributions to the civil rights movement; her two marriages, including one of brief family contentment with police detective Andy Stroud, with whom she had her daughter, Lisa; the alienation from the United States that drove her to live abroad. Alongside these threads runs a darker one - Nina’s increasing and sometimes baffling outbursts of rage andpain and her lifelong struggle to overcome a deep sense of personal injustice, which persisted even as she won international renown.