Mitchell deserves more musically sophisticated treatment, though this is serviceable enough as a straight fan-notes homage....
A new biography of the luminous folk singer and musical icon.
If you don’t already believe that Joni Mitchell (b. 1943) is a genius without peer, you might have a hard time making the case from this effusive book, long on gossip but short on analysis, except of a kind of ethereal quality. As Yaffe (English/Syracuse Univ.; Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, 2011, etc.) writes, “Joni may have felt that she was the lone member of the Canadian lunatic generation, but it was her destiny to alchemize all that loneliness into music that made people feel they were not alone.” Meaning, one supposes, that Mitchell, nee Roberta Joan Anderson, wrote songs geared to sensitive people that amounted to a corpus that, as David Crosby once proclaimed, “was the highest quality of songwriting that I’d run into. I liked her better than Dylan or anybody.” Yaffe’s book is a useful appreciation, but it doesn’t delve enough into the whys and wherefore of that songwriting and its high quality—why an odd open tuning mixed with onrushing lyrics should alchemize into something like “Coyote,” say, though we do learn that there was a lot of sex and cocaine in LA in the 1970s and that Jackson Browne and James Taylor may not be the nice guys their public images suggest. “Even if cocaine fueled some of Hejira’s powerful songs,” writes Yaffe, “the clarity of going off coke produced other songs that came from a different and equally compelling kind of power.” That’s a soufflé of a sentence, and, like so much of the book, it needs more grounding in Mitchell’s actual work and at a deeper level than, for example, “it is on the bridge about the ‘lonesome blues’ that the chords get interesting.”
Mitchell deserves more musically sophisticated treatment, though this is serviceable enough as a straight fan-notes homage. Readers wanting to go deeper into the art would do better to start with Malka Marom’s Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words (2014).Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-24813-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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