Worth it for the informative first half, but not the comprehensive assessment that Waits’s artistry deserves.
The bard of musical lowlife receives a sometimes ill-tempered biography.
British music journalist Hoskyns has long been an astute chronicler of Los Angeles rock; Hotel California (2006) briefly surveyed Waits’s early work in the context of the ’70s L.A. singer-songwriter scene. Here the author takes an expansive unauthorized look at Waits’s life and career. Hoskyns offers a well-delineated picture of the artist’s formative years in the Southern California towns of Whittier and San Diego, where his infatuation with Beat literature and old-school pop and jazz led to what the author calls “round-the-clock performance art”—the formulation of the musician’s anachronistic, finger-popping, prematurely grizzled stage persona. Hoskyns is at his best in amply reported chapters recalling Waits’s first flush of fame in Los Angeles as a gutter-crawling, melody-spinning boho poet. Witnesses include his producer Bones Howe and several intimates at the West Hollywood Troubadour club—though not, regrettably, early flame Rickie Lee Jones. The book grows less rewarding after Waits’s wife and creative partner Kathleen Brennan enters the picture. Hoskyns plainly lacks any abiding interest in the more experimental, cacophonous recordings that commenced in 1983 with Swordfishtrombones. The latter part of his account, which leans heavily on secondary sources, devolves into wearying, infrequently edifying laundry lists of album tracks, theatrical projects (mostly with Robert Wilson) and movie roles. The writer also encountered difficulty in enlisting cooperation from friends and musical associates of the privacy-loving Waits, and he loudly grinds his axe by including an appendix of several e-mails declining his interview requests. By the end, Hoskyns’s tone has turned peevish, and his admiration for Waits’s oddly beautiful, envelope-pushing music is eclipsed by his journalistic frustration.
Worth it for the informative first half, but not the comprehensive assessment that Waits’s artistry deserves.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2708-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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