The Buffalo Funk
Paperback
Ships in 2 to 5 working days. Delivery quoted from your address at checkout.
Read the opening free
3,722 words · no email, no account
No. 046 · Music · R&B & Soul
Suite 434
a biography of Whitney Elizabeth Houston
What the book is
Newark, 1963. In the choir loft of New Hope Baptist Church, Cissy Houston bends over her daughter and shapes the breath in her chest into something the world will one day call a miracle. The girl is small. The voice is not.
By the time Whitney Houston was thirty, she had sold more records than almost any woman alive, sung the anthem of a country at war, and crossed every line the music industry drew between Black gospel and white pop. She had also begun to vanish — into marriage, into rumor, into the slow erosion of the instrument her mother had built note by note in a Newark sanctuary.
Yvette Childress follows the long arc between those two rooms: the church that raised her and the corporation that sold her. She examines the bargains struck on her behalf before she was old enough to refuse them, the silences kept by the people who loved her, and the public's appetite for a Black woman who could be everything to everyone and nothing to herself.
Drawing on the testimony of family, producers, and the women who sang beside her, Childress asks what it costs to be made into a voice — and what is left of the person when the voice is finally still.
At a glance
- Subject
- Whitney Elizabeth Houston
- Shelf
- Music · R&B & Soul
- Written by
- Yvette Childress
- Chapters
- 18 across 205 pages
- Narrated by
- Nadia Kerr
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The BoosRead free
- 02The Drinkard Daughters4,354 words
- 03The Voice in the Choir3,662 words
- 04Robyn3,641 words
- 05Sweetwater's3,620 words
- 06*Whitney Houston* (1985)3,499 words
- 07*Whitney* (1987) and the Records3,179 words
- 08The Anthem3,530 words
- 09*The Bodyguard* and *I Will Always Love You*3,822 words
- 10The Marriage3,770 words
- 11*Waiting to Exhale*, *The Preacher's Wife*, and the Return to Gospel4,228 words
- 12The Decline3,520 words
- 13Crack Is Whack3,406 words
- 14The Comeback That Wasn't3,647 words
- 15Beverly Hilton2,970 words
- 16New Hope3,323 words
- 17Bobbi Kristina3,465 words
- 18The Voice and the Silence3,268 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 205 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 205 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-032-4 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Nadia Kerr
ISBN 979-8-90623-013-3
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is Suite 434 about?
Whitney Elizabeth Houston. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Suite 434 — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,722 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 64,500 words, 18 chapters, 205 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
