An interesting duet that details precisely how women truly rock.
Shared memoir by the Wilson sisters, driving forces behind the band Heart and pioneers of the hard-rock scene for countless female musicians.
"We never took up that cause on purpose—it was accidental, or at best the fate we were born to," writes Wilson. "We were naive, young, and unwilling to believe that we couldn't do something just because we were females." The sisters were part of a very musical family. Both parents were accomplished musicians who always had opera, jazz, folk or country music playing. The family, including older sister Lisa, would sing together on road trips. Ann received a guitar while home sick from school for several weeks, but it was Nancy, four years younger, who took to it. When they saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, the sisters knew they wanted to be rock stars. As teenagers, Ann and Nancy performed together for family, friends and eventually small crowds. They were hooked. Since the 1970s, Heart has had top-10 hits in four different decades and sold more than 35 million records. With the help of Cross (Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller Than Our Souls, 2009, etc.), the sisters take turns describing the highs and lows of being females in a male-dominated world, the loves that led them to write "Magic Man" and "Barracuda," the joys of motherhood and partying with rock legends. "When I first auditioned for Heart and sat in with my sister's band back in those Vancouver cabarets, I never imagined that I was signing up for a life under the microscope," writes Nancy Wilson. "Seeing my personal failures highlighted in the press was a price of fame, but it was a steep cost.”
An interesting duet that details precisely how women truly rock.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-210167-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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