The Twelve Adopted Children
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4,513 words · no email, no account
No. 093 · Music · Jazz
The Curtis Rejection
a biography of Eunice Kathleen Waymon (Nina Simone)
What the book is
Saturday mornings in Tryon, North Carolina, a Black girl named Eunice Waymon climbed the steps to a white woman's parlor and learned Bach. She was six. She would practice eight hours a day for the next decade, certain she was being prepared for the concert stage.
The Curtis Institute closed that door in a single afternoon. To pay her mother's rent, Eunice took a job at the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City and was told, on her first night, that she would have to sing. She invented a name so her Methodist mother would not recognize it on a marquee. The voice that emerged — low, unhurried, classically schooled and gospel-fed — belonged to no genre then in existence.
Adele Trahern follows Nina Simone from the chitlin circuit to Carnegie Hall, from Selma to Liberia to a small apartment in the south of France, tracing the architecture of a self-made artist and the forces working steadily to dismantle her. She writes with equal care about the hour in which she composed "Mississippi Goddam" and the years in which her illness and her rage made her dangerous to the people she loved most.
What emerges is a portrait of a woman who refused, at every turn, to be smaller than her gift — and of an American century that punished her for it.
At a glance
- Subject
- Eunice Kathleen Waymon (Nina Simone)
- Shelf
- Music · Jazz
- Written by
- Adele Trahern
- Chapters
- 18 across 184 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
- 01TryonRead free
- 02Mrs. Mazzy3,015 words
- 03Curtis3,104 words
- 04The Midtown Bar3,103 words
- 05Little Girl Blue3,537 words
- 06Carnegie Hall3,563 words
- 07Lorraine2,552 words
- 08Mississippi Goddam3,504 words
- 09Four Women3,560 words
- 10Andy3,439 words
- 11The Movement3,705 words
- 12The Wedding Ring3,265 words
- 13Barbados and Liberia3,614 words
- 14The Diagnosis3,442 words
- 15My Baby Just Cares for Me3,391 words
- 16Lisa3,395 words
- 17Carry-le-Rouet2,193 words
- 18The High Priestess4,063 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 184 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 184 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 979-8-90470-046-1 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Nadia Kerr
ISBN 979-8-90623-027-0
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Curtis Rejection about?
Eunice Kathleen Waymon (Nina Simone). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Curtis Rejection — 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 4,513 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 184 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.
