A balanced biography that gives credit where it is due.
A pioneering musical artist belatedly receives her first biography.
In 1968, the release of Switched-On Bach blew the doors open for the acceptance of synthesizers in music. That album was created by Wendy Carlos (b. 1939), who was born Walter Carlos before transitioning to Wendy. Though she wouldn’t undergo “gender confirmation surgery” until 1972 and wouldn’t go public with her gender identity until the end of that decade, the artist the public knew as Walter was deeply closeted and “nowhere to be found” as the album became a critical and commercial success. Sewell, music director of Interlochen Public Radio, focuses more on Carlos’ music than on her personal life, as Carlos would clearly wish, though she didn’t participate in this book or consent to an interview. Nonetheless, the author demonstrates that she was as important to the success of the Moog synthesizer as the Moog was for her, that she was a pioneering artist in ambient music as well, and that she dismissed being pigeonholed for her synthesized Bach. Sewell shows that she is a difficult woman who has fallen out with friends and collaborators, filed suit against those who attempt to stream or sell her music—currently unavailable except through back channels and secondary sources—and accused the “New York musical mafia” of killing her career by ignoring her. Her unexpected initial success, writes the author, was “both a dream come true and an absolute nightmare come to life,” and she continued to shrink from public view just as public interest hit its peak. Subsequently, it became increasingly challenging to promote an artist who wouldn’t perform or appear in public, resisted being photographed, and wanted absolute control over everything, from her rare interviews to the way her music was sold. Sewell, who does solid excavation work, includes a discography and videography as well as a glossary of “terms and concepts related to gender identity.”
A balanced biography that gives credit where it is due.Pub Date: April 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-005346-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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