The Last Holiday - A Memoir - By Gil Scott-Heron - Book Review - NYTimes.com Gil Scott-Heron grew up surrounded by heroism. He distrusted empty promises and easy solutions. He also had a very hard time with himself. Whether you expect a memoir to explain how the third sentence relates to the first two will determine how you feel about this posthumous book. "The Last Holiday," published eight months after Scott-Heron's death at 62, provides sharp oratorical examinations of the American social contract as well as a pop star's bathetic memories and celebrity encounters. At some point in the second half of his life, he became a crack addict; his career and ambitions and relationships suffered for it. This is all public knowledge, though it forms no part of his memoir except in very cloudy hints ­toward the end. Scott-Heron tells us he respected "books and teachers and laws." He calls Thurgood Marshall "my candidate for Man of the Century." He was a Samaritan, a political activist who learned that symbolic gestures went only so far and a moralist who knew that nobody could be forced to believe anything. Precocious in youth - at 20 a published novelist and poet, a teacher of literature at Federal City College in Washington a few years later - Scott-Heron might have made an excellent old man, one with much to teach us. Some of the problems he wrote about in the "70s and "80s have since intensified: environmental disaster ("We Almost Lost Detroit"); consumer stupor ("The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"); the triangle of addiction, family implosion and jail ("The Bottle," "Angel Dust," "Home Is Where the Hatred Is"). But he slipped away long before his death. In the last decade, what one mostly read about Scott-Heron was a post-history of a living person: articles about his drug sentences and jail time, a missed parole hearing, an alleged act of domestic aggression against a girlfriend. He played concerts, but his final album - "I'm New Here," released in 2010 - was his first collection of new material in 16 years, and seemed at least as much the vision of its assembler, the English producer Richard Russell, as that of its star. So it is with this book. In a letter included in the British edition of "The Last Holiday" - and not included in Grove's American edition; a mistake, in my view - Jamie Byng of Canongate Books explains how the memoir came about. Scott-Heron had been working on it in the "90s as a third-person narrative, Byng says. Let's call that Book A. The manuscript had been centrally about his 1980-81 tour as an opening act for Stevie Wonder, who mightily impressed him, and that singer's campaign to honor Martin Luther King Jr. with a federal holiday, culminating in a rally in Washington. The holiday was first observed in 1986. Presumably the story would have ended there; maybe it was a book about King and Wonder and only secondarily about the narrator, whom Scott-Heron called "the artist." He rewrote it in the first person, with occasional verse, starting in 2004, at his editor's request: thus, Book B. It is good to know all this, because a reader quickly starts to wonder: what kind of book is this? When did Scott-­Heron write each section, and what was he trying to prove at the time of writing it? Why do many stories - like one about a protest he led, while a student at Lincoln University, against poor campus health services; or one about his involvement with the 1979 concerts against nuclear power that became the album and film "No Nukes" - slide into vagueness, as if the outcomes weren't important? There are weird tonal shifts, lingerings over minor details, and anecdotes about Stevie Wonder's touring retinue and sense of humor that would seem proportionate in Book A but are oversize in Book B. We read about Scott-Heron in a Houston hotel, spacing out in front of the TV, and we begin a two-page side road about Texans, full of run-on thoughts: "People in Texas seem to have tremendous egos, no matter what part of the state they're in or what part they play in it. Their partisan perspective toward their state was probably appropriate when they were what they hadn't yet been told they were not anymore. This is good - it's the rhetorical wordplay that made his raps between songs so vivid and funny - but nearly meaningless in the context of this book. Ben Ratliff is a music critic for The Times and the author of "The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music."