Informative and detailed, but intended for the Kiss Army, not civilians.
Amalgam of material gathered in 1979 and contemporary interviews with members and associates of the veteran theatrical rock band Kiss.
Credit for honesty goes to TV writer/producer Leaf, who opens by urging, “If you are not a Kiss fan, put this book down.” That sums up the flavor and purpose of this collaboration. In 1979, Leaf interviewed the four original Kiss members (Ace Frehley, Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, and Peter Criss) for a never-issued authorized biography focused on the group’s rapid rise from cult band to touring phenomenon. This forms the first section, followed by the contributions of music journalist and Kiss admirer Sharp, who urged Leaf to revive the old manuscript. He begins with a 30-page essay covering the “non-makeup years” following the original band’s breakup, then presents what he terms an “oral history” of Kiss. These interviews provide the heart of this hagiography, discussing nearly every song the band ever recorded and other minutiae—details of tours, merchandising, comic books, behind-the-scenes mishaps—of interest mainly to diehards. Leaf’s workmanlike bio certainly captures the spirit of the brief moment when Kiss was on top, although the sunny, managed tone of the band’s comments to him contrast with Sharp’s account of their commercial decline and infighting. The later interviews are more revealing, although much of the subject matter was covered in Simmons’s acerbic memoir. Since Kiss and Make-Up (2001) devoted much space to slagging recalcitrant members Frehley and Criss, it seems fair that they have their say here; they come across as spacey and vain, but not mean-spirited like Simmons. Surprisingly candid on such topics as the prevalence of payola, sales shenanigans, and chart-fixing in the ’70s music industry, the musicians are vague on the intimate details of their travails in the ’80s and ’90s, before a 1996 reunion in makeup presaged Kiss’s profitable second coming as a metal-nostalgia act.
Informative and detailed, but intended for the Kiss Army, not civilians.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53073-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
